Language samples and analysis

Question 0

What factors may affect the communicative sample obtained?

Answer 0

Was it reproduced faithfully?
Don't generalise results from small, isolated sample.
Allow time for child to respond.
Did you use open-ended questions?
What was the environment like?
Language samples are affected by:
Environment
Partners
Interaction
Opportunity
Motivation

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Question 1

What are strategies for getting a more representative language sample?

Answer 1

Less clinician control - play based that follows child’s lead
Less clinician contrivance - not planned by SLP, child chooses topic
Less conscious child - Make sure the child not self-conscious

Question 2

What are different types of language samples and how do you elicit them?

Answer 2

1. Spontaneous: record child while playing.
2. Imitation: can you say what I say?
3. Automatic eg. days of the week
4. Patterned elicitation: fill in the blanks
5. Conversational: questions about them or recent activities.
6. (Spoken) narratives: story retell, procedural, story generation

Question 4

What are the methods for analysis of form?

Answer 4

• Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)
• Identify Brown’s stage of language development
• Calculate percentage correct use of Brown’s 14 morphemes

Question 5

What are the methods for analysis of use?

Answer 5

Pragmatic functions:

- Primitive speech acts

Question 6

What are the methods for analysis of content?

Answer 6

Semantic analysis:

• Individual semantic roles
• Type Token Ration

Other observations:

• Underextensions
• Overextensions
• Indefinite words
• GAP verbs

Question 7

Why use language sampling?

Answer 7

1. Provides a valid means of identifying language capabilities [in context]
   e. g., gain information about how the child communicates:
   - with familiar communication partners
   - when talking about different topics (familiarity; interest)
   - different levels of stress → may assist SP to detect subtle strengths and weaknesses
2. Potentially a less threatening and less demanding assessment (hopefully e.g., if child not bombarded with questions
3. Cost and time effective
4. Do just about anywhere with minimal resources
5. Can get lots of different information - syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology.

Question 8

What are the four phases of language sampling?

Answer 8

1. Gathering and recording language
2. Transcription
3. Analysis
4. Interpretation

Question 9

What is MLU?

Answer 9

No. of morphemes/ no. of utterances.
Describes syntactic complexity of child’s language.
Lower MLUs indicate that new structures need to be added to the child’s utterances to increase complexity.

Question 10

What is Type Token Ratio?

Answer 10

Assesses lexical diversity (how many different words child is using).
Count total number of words, count number of different words.
NDW/TNW
Should be about 1:2 or TTR of 0.5