No abstract

Characteristics of the participant sample and measures used for language and SES may explain these results and are important considerations when interpreting results of studies or developing policies for intervention. The usefulness of commonly used categories of language delay is questioned.

The Reynell Developmental Language Scales III have been designed to test the language abilities of children from 18 months to 7 years. They have been standardized on a large, representative sample of children in the United Kingdom and thereby provide a robust measure of language achievement. These Scales provide clinicians with the means of comparing the performance of children who have been referred for therapy, or who are in therapy, with the performance of a large group of normally developing children. The Scales reflect the developmental progression of normal child language in the early years, focusing on key features of child language acquisition at different stages as well as on features which are known to distinguish language impaired-children from language-normal children. While not claiming that the tests are fully comprehensive, the authors maintain that they afford the clinician with a means of looking at components of language while also gaining some insights into the child's ability to integrate vocabulary and grammar. It is recognized that no test can fully assess every aspect of language; essentially a test must be practical in terms of design and, for screening purposes, sufficiently comprehensive to be used with a large section of children referred. In addition to fulfilling these criteria, the Scales have been designed to provide some diagnostic indicators of areas of difficulty. The aims of the original Scales were to provide a measure of verbal ability that could be compared with mental age, and to provide separate scores for production and comprehension. These aims have also been realized in the new version. Additionally a test has been provided that is consonant with information gained from the intensive research in the field of child language that has taken place since the original Scales were devised. The Scales can reveal information about a child's language abilities not readily available from observation and serve a useful function in both identifying disorder and evaluating therapy. Clinicians are increasingly being asked to demonstrate effectiveness of therapy but are hampered by inappropriate outcome measures (Law 1997). It is hoped that the RDLS III provides a test that is valid and reliable and one that can contribute to both the characterization of speech and language disorders and the measurement of treatment efficacy.

The Uiqiversit)! of ReadingIt has been proposed that grammatical specific language impairment (SLI) is characterized as a deficit affecting only feature-related aspects of grammar. The research reported here indicates a wider irnpairnient involving aspects of grammar not determined by feature checking. in particular to the structure of the verb phrase (VP) with resultative s~condary predication. The results of two video elicitation tasks showed children with SLI to have a significant deficit on such VP constructions compared with chronological age matches and younger vocabulary matches. These findings are accounted for by the deficit in dependency relations proposed by van der Lely (1996) to the effect that nonbinary syntactic dependencies are vulnerable in grammatical SLI. Additionally, it is shown that research using mean length of utterance matching of children with SLI may obscure syntactic problems revealed by matching with younger children on another language trait.

This article describes the development of new scales for assessing the status of a young child’s language comprehension and production. Items and sections on the scales were included to reflect advances in research on language acquisition and impairment. The New Reynell Developmental Language Scales (NRDLS) were trialled on 301 children and then standardized on a sample of 1,266 participants across the age range 2;00–7;06 years. Evaluations of reliability (internal and test–retest) and concurrent validity were carried out and also discriminant validity was evaluated with a further small sample of children with primary language impairment. Results are reported and discussed. An illustrative example of how the NRDLS could be used is given, in which the performance of a typically developing child and that of a matched child with primary language impairment are compared.