Profiling morpho-syntactic and discourse development - Summary

Sat Jan 20 07:43:20 UTC 2007

Dear all,

Below is a summary of the responses to my query, with a very sincere *Thank You* to Isabelle Barrière, Ruth Berman, Paul Fletcher, Judith Johnston and Tom Roeper.

These are some of the instruments in current use: 

CELF (Psychological Corporation).

For English- and Spanish-speaking children, used by SLPs. 

Information available from 

http://harcourtassessment.com/HAIWEB/Cultures/en-us/default 

Creative Curriculum Development.

For English and Spanish. Includes a teachers' observation instrument, and discourse assessment.

DELV (Psychological Corporation).

Developed for AAE by Harry Seymour, Jill deVilliers, and Tom Roeper. 

Information available from http://www.umass.edu/aae/ 

ERRNI (Dorothy Bishop -- Psychological Corporation).

Normed instrument, accounts for discourse development.

NRS report.

Tests vocabulary (subtest of Peabody), a few syntactic structures and mathematical abilities in English and Spanish. Used for bilinguals too, though not normed on bilinguals. Does not test discourse abilities.

Preschool Language Skills.

For English- and Spanish-speaking children, used by SLPs. 

Rice-Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment.(Psychological Corporation).

For morphosyntax, particularly verb morphology.

SALT.

Description and illustration at www.languageanalysislab.com <http://www.languageanalysislab.com/> 

User-friendly, provides normative data on a wide range of variables, enabling profiling of discourse, length, processing, lexical, morphological and syntactic variables. Own coding required for in-depth analysis, namely, of syntax. 

Judith Johnston and Funda Acarlar have completed a version of this programme for Turkish speaking children, forthcoming as Acarlar, F. & Johnston, J. (2006) Computer-based analysis of Turkish child language:  Clinical and research applications, Journal of Multilingual Communication Disorders, 4, 78-94.

TROG-2 (Dorothy Bishop -- Psychological Corporation).

Normed for comprehension of grammar.

Other comments:

Isabelle Barrière suggested references about the lack of standardised assessment tools for discourse and about a coding system for the Frog Story to enable its application across languages, cultures and age-groups. 

She is currently working on a summary of different assessment instruments aimed at Special Education.

Ruth Berman suggested looking at the "Nun studies", viz. Tracy Mitzner and Susan Kemper's, and kindly sent me a paper forthcoming in _Discourse Processes_: Berman &  

Nir-Sagiv 'Comparing Narrative and Expository Text Construction Across Adolescence:

A Developmental Paradox'. 

Judith Johnston's new book addresses assessment instruments in clinical practice, including the use of SALT. Reference (available through Amazon):

Johnston, J. (2006)  Thinking about child language: Research to practice. Thinking Publications.

CDI.

Though not addressed in my query, two pointers were certainly relevant:

Isabelle Barrière is directing research on templates to code cross-linguistic CDI-gathered data to account for grammatical development and form-meaning mapping. 

Paul Fletcher (with Twila Tardif et al.) normed CDI for Mandarin in Beijing. Publication is expected this year.

About LARSP: 

I gathered that it may still be used in SLP courses in a few English-speaking European countries, in South Africa and Australasia, but not in America (USA, Canada).

Madalena
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Madalena Cruz-Ferreira 
Dept. English Language and Literature 
National University of Singapore 
ellmcf at nus.edu.sg 
http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/ellmcf/ <https://exchange.nus.edu.sg/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=https://exchange.nus.edu.sg/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/ellmcf/>  
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