Four informal methods of language evaluation were compared: spontaneous language sampling, elicited imitation, sentence completion, and grammatical judgment. Thirty children from two age levels (4–5 and 6–7 years) with diagnosed language problems were tested with each of these evaluation procedures. Overall comparisons between tasks revealed significant correlations between spontaneous sampling, elicited imitation, and sentence completion. However, when these tasks were examined with regard to individual syntactic structure, a highly variable pattern of comparability was observed. None of the task comparisons involving grammatical judgment reached statistical significance. The implications of these findings for the clinical application of the four evaluation procedures are discussed.
Summary
This paper presents a therapeutic approach based on psycholinguistic theory as a method for initiating two word utterances in children's spontaneous language. The method of treatment has been used experimentally for several years as an individual treatment program in a clinical setting. The subjects were three and four year old children who used only single word utterances. The responses of these subjects to this approach indicated that this theory and therapy was a useful method to enable these children with language problems to proceed in the developmental sequence of language acquisition.
This article presents a case study of a child whose substitution patterns were affected by the constraints of individual words. Theory, data, and practical suggestions are presented that show the need to use linguistic considerations of word constraints in the analysis of some children’s sound patterns.
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