Reliable measures in 7-minute language samples from children with developmental language disorder

What is it about?

We examined the reliability of measures from conversational language samples from kindergarten and first-grade students with typical language and developmental language disorder (DLD). Mean length of utterance (MLU), number of different words, subordination index, errors and omissions, and percent grammatical utterances (PGU) were reliable in samples as short as 3-10 minutes when compared to longer 25-minute samples.

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Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Why is it important?

SLPs report a lack of time for using language sample analysis. This study shows reliable measures may be obtained using short, 7-minute samples from children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Samples can be collected, transcribed, and analyzed in 20-35 minutes using language sample analysis programs including Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT), Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN), and Sampling Utterances and Grammatical Analysis Revised (SUGAR).