Factors influencing the selection of standardized tests for the diagnosis of specific language impairment.

Purpose: Standardized tests are one of the primary assessment tools used by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to diagnose child language impairment. Numerous child language tests are commercially available; however, it is unknown what factors lead clinicians to select particular tests to use in clinical practice. This study investigated whether the quality of standardized tests, as measured by the test's psychometric properties, is related to how frequently the tests are used in clinical practice.

Identification of clinical markers of specific language impairment in adults.

Purpose: To investigate the usefulness of 3 tasks known to be effective diagnostic clinical markers of specific language impairment (SLI) in children: (a) nonword repetition, (b) sentence repetition, and (c) grammaticality judgments of finiteness marking.

Method: Two groups of young adults, 13 with SLI and 18 with typical language, completed 3 experimental tasks: (a) nonword repetition, (b) sentence repetition, and (c) grammaticality judgments of sentences that were either correct or contained an omitted finiteness marker, an overt agreement error, or an omitted progressive -ing. Analyses included receiver operating characteristic curve analyses and computation of likelihood ratios associated with the use of each task as a clinical marker for SLI, as well as development of a logistic regression model that used multiple tasks as predictors.

A comparison of semantic and syntactic event related potentials generated by children and adults.

The present study employs event related potentials (ERPs) to verify the utility of using electrophysiological measures to study developmental questions within the field of language comprehension. Established ERP components (N400 and P600) that reflect semantic and syntactic processing were examined. Fifteen adults and 14 children (ages 8-13) processed spoken stimuli containing either semantic or syntactic anomalies.

Measuring articulatory error consistency in children with developmental apraxia of speech.

Error inconsistency is often cited as a characteristic of children with speech disorders, particularly developmental apraxia of speech (DAS); however, few researchers operationally define error inconsistency and the definitions that do exist are not standardized across studies. This study proposes three formulas for measuring various aspects of articulatory error consistency: proportion of errors, consistency of error types, and consistency of the most frequently used error type. Each formula is explained using examples of productions from children with DAS and phonological delay.