Measuring productive syntactic abilities in Mandarin-speaking children in Taiwan.

Purpose: This study aimed to develop a fine-grained measure for evaluating syntactic abilities in Mandarin-speaking children for educational and clinical purposes as a supplement to MLU.

Method: In total, 99 typically developing children, aged 2;0 to 5;11, living in Taipei, Taiwan, participated in this study. Spontaneous language samples were elicited in free-play situations.

The role of vocabulary and grammar in the listening text comprehension of school-age Cantonese-speaking children with developmental language disorder.

The current study examined the role of vocabulary and grammar in the listening comprehension of school-age Cantonese-speaking children with developmental language disorder in Hong Kong. Participants were 692 typically developing children (TD) and 53 children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and they were tested with a standardized test of oral Cantonese, which includes measures on listening comprehension, receptive and expressive grammar, expressive vocabulary, word definition and lexical relations. The results from multiple regression analysis revealed that listening comprehension of the TD group was explained by receptive grammar, expressive vocabulary, and lexical relationships.

Narrative assessment for Cantonese-speaking children.

Background: This study examined the narrative skills of Cantonese-speaking school-age children to fill a need for a normative language test for school-age children.

Purpose: To provide a benchmark of the narrative skills of Cantonese-speaking children; to identify which of the microstructure components was the best predictor of age; and to determine the diagnostic accuracy of the test components.

Method And Procedure: Data were collected from 1,120 Cantonese-speaking children between the ages of 4;10 (years;months) and 12;01, using a story-retell of a 24-frame picture series.