Measures of Syntax in School-Age Children and Adolescents

Abstract

peech-language pathologists who work with school-age children and adolescents with language disorders face a special set of challenges when it comes to describing and interpreting syntactic ability in language performance data. There are few linguistic profiling systems or quantitative measures that have been applied widely to language samples of older children. This contrasts with relatively well-established procedures for determining the grammatical abilities of preschool children with suspected language disorders.Using quantitative measures such as mean length of utterance (MLU) and profiling syntactic structures at the word, phrase. and clause levels, the extent of developmental delay can be identified with some confidence. For instance, a clinician might determine that a 4-year-old uses language forms that are more characteristic of a 2-year-old. Such a comparison assumes that clinicians know how 2-year-olds talk and agree on quantitative and qualitative ways of describing language. But, could syntactic difficulties be determined as easily in an I l-year-old. or a 14-year-ABSTRACT: Syntactic measures developed for preschool children are insensitive to later-developing forms produced by older children. Information concerning syntax in school-age children and adolescents is available but has not yet emerged as a set of measures widely used by speech-language pathologists. This article identifies several sources of information about syntax from language samples (spoken and written) and from standardized language tests. Language samples yield information on sentence length, clause density, and use of higher level, discourse-motivated structures. Syntactic subtests from three standardized language tests for school-age children and adolescents are analyzed in order to determine structural content and processing format.

Effects of a Conversation-Based Intervention on the Linguistic Skills of Children With Motor Speech Disorders Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication

“…These represent a variety of morpho-syntactic structures that are essential to early clause formation and typically used to assess grammatical development in children (see Manhardt & Rescorla, 2002;Thordardottir, Chapman, & Wagner, 2002). As a child's language develops, the number of clauses produced during discourse increases (Scott & Stokes, 1995). Rate was used to convert the target behavior counts to a constant scale as observation times varied slightly across sessions (Gast, 2010).…”

Growth in syntactic complexity between 4 years and adulthood: evidence from a narrative task

“…There is, however, evidence of a continued increase in MLU with age, in both conversation and narration, continuing until adolescence (Loban, 1976;Klecan-Aker & Hedrick, 1985;Scott, 1988;Leadholm & Miller, 1992;Scott & Stokes, 1995;Nippold, 1998). Most studies of older children tend to use MLU in words (MLUw) rather than morphemes, once children reliably produce full sentences.…”

“…Our aim was to find out whether children from 4 years used a full range of complex syntactic structures, or whether the longer utterances in older children arose because some types of clausal construction do not feature in utterances of younger children (Scott, 1988;Scott & Stokes, 1995). To address this question, we looked at how the use of different clause types changed with age, and evaluated developmental trends between 4 years and adulthood for a commonly used index of syntactic complexity -clausal density.…”

“…Grammatical segmentation is easier to apply consistently and less ambiguous than segmentation using intonational and prosodic cues (Scott & Stokes, 1995;Wong et al, 2004). …”

“…Clause packages integrate structural and pragmatic function, in that connectives such as and, so and but are distinguished depending on whether they serve as grammatical connectives or pragmatic introductions to the utterance. Finally, clausal density, which is the mean number of clauses per utterance, also known as the index of subordination, (e.g., Scott, 1988;Guttierez-Clellen & Hofstetter, 1994;Scott & Stokes, 1995) is the measure of interest used in the current paper. On this measure, the second of these sentences would score higher than the first.…”