Seeking a valid gold standard for an innovative, dialect-neutral language test

Using language sample analyses across English dialects: A case-based approach for preschoolers

This study compared language samples from typically developing 4-year-olds who spoke African American English (AAE), Jamaican English (JE), or Mainstream American English (MAE) to assess the value of using language sample analysis (LSA) measures for characterising language use across dialects of English. Specific LSA metrics included mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes and in words, the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn), Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) and measures of lexical diversity. Children demonstrated diverse linguistic patterns across dialects, but a Kruskal-Wallis H test did not reveal significant differences in scores obtained through LSA measures. Notably, the IPSyn captured morphosyntactic structures in each category across dialects where prior research has highlighted limitations. This preliminary study uses a case-based approach to illustrate the applicability of LSAs in describing linguistic variations across children who speak different dialects of English. Moreover, the findings from this study underscore the potential use of LSAs in describing linguistic patterns to support the characterisation of communication profiles for culturally and linguistically diverse children.

Embracing Theory as Liberatory Practice: Journeying Toward a Critical Praxis of Speech, Language, and Hearing

PURPOSE

The purpose of this tutorial is to guide practitioners to a critical praxis of speech, language, and hearing. This tutorial provides a foundational knowledge of critical theory as an approach to framing, conceptualizing, and interpreting phenomena and demonstrates its application to the speech, language, and hearing profession.

METHOD

This tutorial reviews critical theory as a category of frameworks that challenge existing power structures and provides a critical analysis of the profession's approach to language using a raciolinguistic framework. Questions are included for the reader to guide self-reflection and preparation for enacting a critical praxis oriented toward justice. Recommended readings are provided for the reader to continue the journey beyond these pages.

RESULTS

The author presents a critical praxis of speech, language, and hearing, drawing directly from two additional critical frameworks: Black fugitivity and culturally sustaining pedagogy. This critical praxis is discussed within the context of three major areas-activism, assessment, and intervention-with a reconsideration of how to leverage skills, resources, and strategies in a way that centers (racial) identity formation and multimodal communication.

CONCLUSION

Next steps are suggested, and readers are invited to become theorists who continue to develop a critical praxis for their context.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22312213.

Using Free Computer-Assisted Language Sample Analysis to Evaluate and Set Treatment Goals for Children Who Speak African American English

Purpose Spoken language sample analysis (LSA) is widely considered to be a critical component of assessment for child language disorders. It is our best window into a preschool child's everyday expressive communicative skills. However, historically, the process can be cumbersome, and reference values against which LSA findings can be "benchmarked" are based on surprisingly little data. Moreover, current LSA protocols potentially disadvantage speakers of nonmainstream English varieties, such as African American English (AAE), blurring the line between language difference and disorder. Method We provide a tutorial on the use of free software (Computerized Language Analysis [CLAN]) enabled by the ongoing National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders-funded "Child Language Assessment Project." CLAN harnesses the advanced computational power of the Child Language Data Exchange System archive (www.childes.talkbank.org), with an aim to develop and test fine-grained and potentially language variety-sensitive benchmarks for a range of LSA measures. Using retrospective analysis of data from AAE-speaking children, we demonstrate how CLAN LSA can facilitate dialect-fair assessment and therapy goal setting. Results Using data originally collected to norm the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation, we suggest that Developmental Sentence Scoring does not appear to bias against children who speak AAE but does identify children who have language impairment (LI). Other LSA measure scores were depressed in the group of AAE-speaking children with LI but did not consistently differentiate individual children as LI. Furthermore, CLAN software permits rapid, in-depth analysis using Developmental Sentence Scoring and the Index of Productive Syntax that can identify potential intervention targets for children with developmental language disorder.

Classification Accuracy of Teacher Ratings When Screening Nonmainstream English-Speaking Kindergartners for Language Impairment in the Rural South

Purpose

We compared teacher ratings as measured by the Teacher Rating of Oral Language and Literacy (TROLL; Dickinson, McCabe, & Sprague, 2001, 2003) and Children's Communication Checklist-Second Edition (CCC-2; Bishop, 2006) to 2 established screeners, the Part II of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Screening Test (DELV-ST-II; Seymour, Roeper, & de Villiers, 2003) and Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills-Next (DIBELS; Good, Gruba, & Kaminski, 2009), and then examined whether teacher ratings alone or when combined with the DELV-ST-II or DIBELS accurately classify nonmainstream English-speaking kindergartners by their clinical status.

Method

Data came from 98 children who lived in the rural South; 47 spoke African American English, and 51 spoke Southern White English. Using the syntax subtest of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Norm Referenced (Seymour, Roeper, & de Villiers, 2005) as the reference standard, 43 were language impaired and 55 were typically developing. Analyses included analysis of variance, correlations, and discriminant function with sensitivity and specificity indices.

Results

The TROLL, CCC-2, DELV-ST-II, and DIBELS showed clinical status but not dialect effects, and they correlated with each other, the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Norm Referenced, and other language measures. Classification accuracies of all 4 tools were too low for screening purposes; however, empirically derived cut scores improved the results, and a discriminant function selected the TROLL and DELV-ST-II as optimal for determining who should be referred for an evaluation, with the TROLL yielding the highest level of sensitivity (77%).

Conclusion

Findings support teacher ratings as measured by the TROLL when screening nonmainstream English-speaking kindergartners for language impairment in the rural South, while also calling for additional development and study of teacher rating tools and other screening instruments.

Supplemental Material

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.6007712.

Identifying risk for language impairment in children from linguistically diverse low-income schools

PURPOSE

To improve screening procedures for children in a linguistically diverse context, we combined tasks known to reveal grammatical deficits in children with language impairment (LI) with training to facilitate performance on a verb elicitation task.

METHOD

Sixty-four first grade children participated. The objective grammatical measures included elicitation of 12 past tense regular verbs preceded by a teaching phase (teach-test), the sentence recall (SR) subtest of the Clinical evaluation of language fundamentals (CELF-4), and a tally of all conjugated verbs from a narrative retell task. Given the widespread reliance on teacher observation for the referral of children suspected of having LI, we compared our results to the spoken language portion of the CELF-4 teacher observational rating scale (ORS).

RESULT

Using teacher observation as a reference for comparison, the past tense elicitation task and the SR task yielded strong discriminating power, but the verb tally was relatively weak. However, combining the three tasks yielded the highest levels of sensitivity (75%) and specificity (92%) than any single measure on its own.

CONCLUSION

This study contributes to alternative assessment practices by highlighting the potential utility of adding a teaching component prior to administering informal grammatical probes.

Does Rare Vocabulary Use Distinguish Giftedness From Typical Development? A Study of School-Age African American Narrators

PURPOSE

The purpose of this study was to examine rare vocabulary produced in the spoken narratives of school-age African American children.

METHOD

Forty-three children from general and gifted classrooms produced 2 narratives: a personal story and a fictional story that was based on the wordless book Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). The Wordlist for Expressive Rare Vocabulary Evaluation (Mahurin-Smith, DeThorne, & Petrill, 2015) was used to tally number and type of uncommon words produced in these narratives. The authors used t tests and logistic regressions to explore classroom- and narrative-type differences in rare vocabulary production. Correlational analysis determined the relationship between dialect variation and rare vocabulary production.

RESULTS

Findings indicated that tallies of rare-word types were higher in fictional narratives, whereas rare-word density-a measure that controls for narrative length-was greater in personal narratives. Rare-word density distinguished children in general classrooms from those in gifted classrooms. There was no correlation between dialect variation and rare-word density.

CONCLUSION

Examining school-age African American children's facility with rare vocabulary production appears to be a dialect-neutral way to measure their narrative language and to distinguish gifted children from typically developing children.

Research to Establish the Validity, Reliability, and Clinical Utility of a Comprehensive Language Assessment of Mandarin

PURPOSE

With no existing gold standard for comparison, challenges arise for establishing the validity of a new standardized Mandarin language assessment normed in mainland China.

METHOD

A new assessment, Diagnostic Receptive and Expressive Assessment of Mandarin (DREAM), was normed with a stratified sample of 969 children ages 2;6 (years;months) to 7;11 in multiple urban and nonurban regions in northern and southern China. In this study of 230 children, the sensitivity and specificity of DREAM were examined against an a priori judgment of disorders. External validity was assessed using 2 indices of language production for different age groups.

RESULTS

External validity was assessed against spontaneous language indices (correlation range: r = .6-.7; all ps < .01) and narrative indices (overall: r = .45, p < .01). Sensitivity (.73) and specificity (.82) of DREAM are moderate to good using a priori judgment as the standard. The values improved to .95 and .82 when spontaneous language and narratives were added to a priori judgment to define typicality. Divergent validity was moderate with nonlinguistic indices.

CONCLUSION

DREAM holds promise as a diagnostic test of Mandarin language impairment for children aged 2;6 to 7;11.

New language outcome measures for Mandarin speaking children with hearing loss

Objective

The paper discusses recent evidence on the assessment of language outcomes in children with hearing loss acquiring oral language.

Methods

Research emphasizes that language tests must be specific enough to capture subtle deficits in vocabulary and grammar learning at different developmental ages. The Diagnostic Receptive and Expressive Assessment of Mandarin (DREAM) was carefully designed to be a comprehensive standardized Mandarin assessment normed in Mainland China.

Results

This paper summarizes the evidence-based item design process and validity and reliability results of DREAM. A pilot study reported here shows that DREAM provided detailed information about hearing impaired children's language abilities and can be used to aid intervention planning to maximize progress.

Conclusion

DREAM represents an example of translational science, transferring methods from empirical studies of language acquisition in research environments into applied domains such as assessment and intervention. Research on outcomes in China will advance significantly with the availability of evidence-based comprehensive language tests that measure a sufficient age range of skills, are normed on Mandarin speaking children in mainland China, and are designed to capture features central to Mandarin language acquisition.

Sample length affects the reliability of language sample measures in 3-year-olds: evidence from parent-elicited conversational samples

PURPOSE

The goal of this study was to investigate the extent to which sample length affected the reliability of total number of words (TNW), number of different words (NDW), and mean length of C-units in morphemes (MLCUm) in parent-elicited conversational samples for 3-year-olds.

METHOD

Participants were sixty 3-year-olds. A 22-min language sample was collected from each child during free play with the parent in the laboratory. Samples of 1, 3, 7, and 10 min were extracted from the 22-min samples. TNW, NDW, and MLCUm were computed from each shorter sample and the 22-min sample. TNW and NDW were adjusted by number of minutes for comparisons. The differences and correlations between each shorter sample cut and the 22-min sample on MLCUm and adjusted TNW and NDW were computed.

RESULTS

The shorter samples and the 22-min samples significantly differed in adjusted TNW and NDW, but not in MLCUm. TNW reached an acceptable reliability level (i.e., r = .90) in 7-min samples. NDW and MLCUm approached the acceptable reliability level (rs = .88) in 7-min samples and reached it in 10-min samples.

CONCLUSION

For conversational language samples with similar collection procedures, samples of 7 to 10 min are desirable for calculating TNW, NDW, and MLCUm in 3-year-olds.

Narrative performance of gifted African American school-aged children from low-income backgrounds

PURPOSE

This study investigated classroom differences in the narrative performance of school-age African American English (AAE)-speaking children in gifted and general education classrooms.

METHOD

Forty-three children, Grades 2-5, each generated fictional narratives in response to the book Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). Differences in performance on traditional narrative measures (total number of communication units [C-units], number of different words, and mean length of utterance in words) and on AAE production (dialect density measure) between children in gifted and general education classrooms were examined.

RESULTS

There were no classroom-based differences in total number of C-units, number of different words, and mean length of utterance in words. Children in gifted education classrooms produced narratives with lower dialect density than did children in general educated classrooms. Direct logistic regression assessed whether narrative dialect density measure scores offered additional information about giftedness beyond scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Fourth Edition (Dunn & Dunn, 2007), a standard measure of language ability. Results indicated that a model with only Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Fourth Edition scores best discriminated children in the 2 classrooms.

CONCLUSION

African American children across gifted and general education classrooms produce fictional narratives of similar length, lexical diversity, and syntax complexity. However, African American children in gifted education classrooms may produce lower rates of AAE and perform better on standard measures of vocabulary than those in general education classrooms.