Assessing Sentence Diversity in Toddlers At-Risk for Language Disorders

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to introduce clinicians to an approach for assessing toddlers' sentence diversity and using criterion-referenced expectations to identify toddlers at-risk for clinically significant delays in grammatical development between 30 and 36 months of age. Method: Five at-risk toddlers were identified from an archival database. Mean length of utterance (MLU), grammatical complexity, and sentence diversity measures at 30 months of age were then used to evaluate the grammatical abilities of the at-risk children. Results: Three participants had MLUs of 1.50 or more standard deviations below the mean which alone would be sufficient for raising clinical concern. Although the other two toddlers had MLUs above 1.50, assessment of sentence diversity identified them as at-risk. The sentence diversity findings were also consistent with low grammatical complexity scores. Discussion: The clinical usefulness of a sentence-focused approach for assessment, intervention planning, and progress monitoring are discussed.

Input Subject Diversity Enhances Early Grammatical Growth: Evidence from a Parent-Implemented Intervention

“…In addition, we may have underestimated the length of time needed to bring about child change. Although diverse third person sentences are expected for nearly all typically developing children by 30 months of age (McKenna & Hadley, 2014), we centered the growth models earlier, at 27 months, with the expectation that intervention would facilitate the use of diverse third person sentences at an earlier age. This may have been overly ambitious, especially for children who were single word users at 21 months of age.…”

Exploring Sentence Diversity at the Boundary of Typical and Impaired Language Abilities

“…It does not inventory the presence of specific syntactic structures nor the lexical diversity within those structures. As such, MLU cannot reveal limited flexibility with SV combinations or an overreliance on formulaic sentence frames (e.g., I want X; that ' s a X ) in toddlers at risk for SLI (e.g., Hadley, 2014 ; McKenna & Hadley, 2014 ). In contrast, comprehensive grammatical analysis approaches such as the Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure ( Crystal et al, 1989 ) and the IPSyn quantify the presence or absence of specific morphological and syntactic structures that emerge between 1.5 and 5 years of age from language samples.…”

“…Finally, McKenna and Hadley (2014) conducted a retrospective analysis of sentence diversity at 30 months for two English-speaking children identified as at risk for SLI based on below-average criterion scores on the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment at 36 months ( Rice & Wexler, 2001 ). At 30 months, the children had low expressive vocabularies at the 10th and 20th percentiles, but they were combining words on a regular basis with MLUs of 2.62 and 1.78.…”

“…Following Rispoli (2019) , we hypothesized that subject diversity in third-person sentences would be influenced by the complexity of the simple sentence type and appear in a developmental sequence: in one-argument copula contexts first, followed by one-argument SV sentences, and finally in two-argument SVO sentences. Based on the developmental patterns reported by Hadley et al (2018) and McKenna and Hadley (2014) , we also expected that toddlers with the greatest risk for persistent SLI, those with severe grammatical delays at 36 months, would have limited sentences with third-person subjects well beyond 30 months of age.…”

“…Taken together, the findings from these descriptive analyses have implications for monitoring risk for SLI with young children. We propose that the absence of third-person subjects at 30 months should raise concern and warrant monitoring of subject diversity from 30 to 36 months (see Hadley, 2014 ; McKenna & Hadley, 2014 ), just as the absence of verbs at 24 months raises clinical concern and warrants monitoring of subsequent verb growth from 24 to 30 months ( Hadley et al, 2016 ; Olswang et al, 1998 ). Moreover, because later emergence and low diversity of third-person subjects were associated with severe delays on the IPSyn at 36 months, the absence of third-person subjects at 36 months may elevate a child's risk for persistent SLI.…”