Mean Length of Utterance in Children With Specific Language Impairment and in Younger Control Children Shows Concurrent Validity and Stable and Parallel Growth Trajectories

Abstract

Purpose Although mean length of utterance (MLU) is a useful benchmark in studies of children with specific language impairment (SLI), some empirical and interpretive issues are unresolved. The authors report on 2 studies examining, respectively, the concurrent validity and temporal stability of MLU equivalency between children with SLI and typically developing children. Method Study 1 used 124 archival conversational samples consisting of 39 children with SLI (age 5;0 [years;months]), 40 MLU-equivalent typically developing children (age 3;0), and 45 age-equivalent controls. Concurrent validity of MLU matches was examined by considering the correspondence between MLU and developmental sentence scoring (DSS), index of productive syntax (IPSyn), and MLU in words. Study 2 used 205 archival conversational samples, representing 5 years of longitudinal data collected on 20 children with SLI (from age 5;0) and 18 MLU matches (from age 3;0). Evaluation of growth dimensions within and across groups was carried out via growth-curve modeling. Results In Study 1, high levels of correlation among the MLU, DSS, and IPSyn measures were observed. Differences between groups were not significant. In Study 2, temporal stability of MLU matches was robust over a 5 year period. Conclusions MLU appears to be a reliable and valid index of general language development and an appropriate grouping variable from age 3 to 10. The developmental stability of MLU matches is indicative of shared underlying growth mechanisms.

Longitudinal Effects on Early Adolescent Language: A Twin Study

“…Although evidence regarding the reliability of productive language-sample measures has been mixed, especially from shorter samples (e.g., Gavin & Giles, 1996;Tilstra & McMaster, 2007), such measures have been associated with evidence of validity through developmental change with age up through age 13 years (Miller et al, 2005;Miller, Freiberg, Holland, & Reeves, 1992; M. L. Rice, Redmond, & Hoffman, 2006); correlation with other measures of linguistic complexity (DeThorne et al, 2008;Nippold, 2009;Nippold et al, 2014; M. L. Rice et al, 2006;Ukrainetz & Blomquist, 2002); and differentiation of clinical groups (e.g., Condouris, Meyer, & Tager-Flusberg, 2003;Scott & Windsor, 2000;Watkins, Kelly, Harbers, & Hollis, 1995).…”

Extensão média do enunciado-palavras em crianças de 4 e 5 anos com desenvolvimento típico da linguagem

“…These results are in agreement with other authors [25][26][27] , who observed a strong influence of this variable in such a way that children who came from higher sociocultural environments showed more complex oral productions and a more advanced linguistic development than children from lower sociocultural backgrounds. However, other authors have not observed a correlation with the background of the children as Rice and colleagues 5 . These differences in the studies and their results may depend upon different variables, such as the age ranges analysed in each study, the kind of linguistic analysis undertaken and also the measures of sociocultural background (parents' level of education, family income and/or father's occupation,…).…”

“…Despite the advantages of using samples of spontaneous discourse over formal tests, there are limitations, namely the way in which the collection process unfolds or the number of utterances that are collected and analysed 5 . Given these difficulties some authors have worked towards optimizing this process by proposing several strategies.…”

Language Sampling for Preschoolers With Severe Speech Impairments

“…First, this study provides initial evidence that for some preschoolers with severe speech impairments, modifications can be made to traditional language sampling analysis to yield useful linguistic measures, such as MLUw and percentage comprehensibility, even when exact word agreement cannot be achieved. Once these methodologies are further validated, including children with severe speech impairments in studies of children with language impairments -who typically are excluded from such investigations (e.g., Rice et al, 2006Rice et al, , 2010-may be possible. Second, comprehensibility from the language samples was correlated with single word comprehensibility from the I-ASCC, indicating that both approaches measured a similar construct for these participants.…”

“…For example, in studies focusing on children with language impairment, children with limited intelligibility are often excluded (e.g., Rice, Redmond, & Hoffman, 2006;Rice, Smolik, Rytting, & Blossom, 2010), despite the fact that speech impairment often co-occurs with language impairment. This practice is understandable, as collecting reliable and valid expressive language information for children with severe speech impairments presents significant challenges; spoken language is necessarily mediated by the presence of the speech impairment.…”