Narratives from three studies were analyzed using seven variables hypothesized to measure a variety of language abilities used in narrative production. Results indicated that the variables represented global organization of content, and within- and across-sentence structure. Variables representing sentence structure were most effective as…

This study examined possible early predictors of reading problems in at-risk children (ages 53 to 77 months). Results indicated that early measures of language awareness are good predictors of later reading performance but that different measures are good predictors for different children. (Author/DB)

The Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language-Revised is intended for use with children ages 3-9 as well as with children and adults with certain disabilities. The test's three sections include Word Classes and Relations, Grammatical Morphemes, and Elaborated Sentences. This paper describes the test's administration, scoring, standardization,…

The three tests that make up this instrument are designed to assess the oral communication, grammatical fluency, and vocabulary development of students for whom English is a second language. The spoken English test comes in two versions: one with 90 items on a cassette tape, the other with 90 items to be read aloud by the examiner. Each version is…

Conversational language samples were elicited from 24 children (ages 2-7), half with specific language impairment (SLI), half with normally developing language (LN), matched for language level. For the SLI children, but not the LN children, increased proportions of questions were correlated to increased proportions of ellipsis. (Author/JDD)

Thirty-one children (aged 6-10) with auditory processing problems completed the Staggered Spondaic Words (SSW) Test and a battery of auditory-language tests. No significant correlations were found between the SSW right competing and left competing conditions and the auditory-language tests, suggesting that these two approaches measure different…

This study investigated the dialectal sensitivity of the T-unit as a nonbiased alternative for assessing the oral grammatical skills of school-age, nonstandard English speakers. Analysis of language samples from 28 9-year-old children (half African-American) revealed no significant differences between groups, suggesting that the T-unit may be a…

Since the numbers of foreign students aspiring to college and graduate degrees in the United States is increasing, there is a need for a reliable and valid English proficiency test which, ideally, would be neither costly nor time consuming. The purpose of this study was twofold. First, the extent to which three tests, the Michigan Test of English…

Noun and verb comprehension of 11 children with cerebral palsy or other motor impairments was assessed by presenting a linguistic stimulus and determining whether the child watched a video event that matched or did not match the stimulus. Subjects, aged 2-6, watched the match significantly more, especially when dynamic visual stimuli were…

Approaches to the analysis of utterance disruptions are reviewed, and a system is proposed for analyzing disruptions in spontaneous language, with four disruption categories (pauses, repetitions, revisions, and orphans). Use of the system is illustrated using language samples from 10 traumatically brain-injured and 10 normally developing speakers…

A study was undertaken to develop a partial credit scheme for scoring cloze-type questions on an English collocation test, obtain construct validity evidence for the test and the scoring scheme using the Rasch Partial Credit Model, and compare partial credit scoring with the more commonly used dichotomous scoring with the same test instrument.…

This study evaluated 9 computer-generated measures of children's language production, based on 24 children with specific language impairment and 24 normally developing children, ages 24-50 months. Three measures possessed desirable developmental and diagnostic characteristics: mean syntactic length, total number of words, and number of different…

This study, involving 20 children (ages 4-11) with severe hearing impairments, affirmed the content validity of the Clark-Madison Test of Oral Language as a measure of nonwritten expressive language with hearing-impaired children. Performance comparison with hearing individuals revealed a different profile of strengths and weaknesses than did…

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised assesses standard American English receptive vocabulary in individuals, both handicapped and nonhandicapped, ages 2 to 40. This paper describes the test's administration, summation of data, standardization, reliability, and validity. (JDD)

This article describes errors resulting from use of standardized language tests using a "normal" sample as the normative comparison group. Resulting errors include, among others, identifying normal children as language impaired, providing misleading profiles of verbal and nonverbal performance, and inability to determine impairment severity.…