Journal articles on the topic 'Developmental Sentence Scoring'

Purpose Sentence repetition and nonword repetition assess different aspects of the linguistic system, but both have been proposed as potential tools to identify children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Cross-linguistic investigation of diagnostic tools for DLD contributes to an understanding of the core features of the disorder. This study evaluated the effectiveness of these tools for the Vietnamese language. Method A total of 104 kindergartners (aged 5;2–6;2 [years;months]) living in Vietnam participated, of which 94 were classified as typically developing and 10 with DLD. Vietnamese sentence repetition and nonword repetition tasks were administered and scored using multiple scoring systems. Sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratios were calculated to assess the ability of these tasks to identify DLD. Results All scoring systems on both tasks achieved adequate to excellent sensitivity or specificity, but not both. Binary scoring of sentence repetition achieved a perfect negative likelihood ratio, and binary scoring of nonword repetition approached a highly informative positive likelihood ratio. More detailed scoring systems for both tasks achieved moderately informative values for both negative and positive likelihood ratios. Conclusions Both sentence repetition and nonword repetition are valuable tools for identifying DLD in monolingual speakers of Vietnamese. Scoring systems that consider number of errors and are relatively simple (i.e., error scoring of sentence repetition and syllables scoring of nonword repetition) may be the most efficient and effective for identifying DLD. Further work to develop and refine these tasks can contribute to cross-linguistic knowledge of DLD as well as to clinical practice.

Summary scores for Developmental Sentence Scoring and the Index of Productive Syntax were obtained from the language samples of 29 preterm children at preschool age. A moderate correlation obtained between these two measures of syntactic complexity. Only Index of Productive Syntax scores distinguished the language abilities of 19 neurologically normal from 10 suspect children.

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.

Researchers and practitioners have questioned whether scoring procedures used with curriculum-based measures of writing (CBM-W) capture growth in complexity of writing. We analyzed data from six independent samples to examine two potential scoring metrics for picture word CBM-W (PW), a sentence-level CBM task. Correct word sequences per response (CWSR) and words written per response (WWR) were compared with the current standard metric of correct word sequences (CWS). Linear regression analyses indicated that CWSR predicted scores on standardized norm-referenced criterion measures in more samples than did WWR or CWS. Future studies should explore the capacity of CWSR and WWR to show growth over time, stability, diagnostic accuracy, and utility for instructional decision making.

AbstractDeaf students' recognition of indefinite pronouns and quantifiers was tested using written materials in the form of comic strips that provided pragmatically appropriate context. One hundred and eighty-seven profoundly hearing-impaired students, aged 7–23 years, served as subjects. There were significant developmental trends for both the indefinite pronouns and the quantifiers, with the quantifiers significantly more difficult than the indefinite pronouns. A comparison of the results with predictions drawn from theoretical linguistics and with predictions drawn from Developmental Sentence Scoring (Lee, 1974) data for hearing children indicates that theoretical predictions are more accurate for hearing-impaired students. This may be due to differences in methodology (DSS reports spontaneous spoken language; the present study reports comprehension of written English) and to educational practices with hearing-impaired students.

The symbolic play and social participation behaviors of 6 language-impaired and 8 normal language-learning children were compared on three measures of play: (a) the Symbolic Play Test (Lowe & Costello, 1976), (b) the Brown-Lunzer Scale (Brown, Redmond, Bass, Liebergott, & Swope, 1975), and (c) the Scale of Social Participation in Play (Tizard, Philps, & Plewis, 1976). Subject groups were equated for MLU (Brown, 1973), Developmental Sentence Scoring (Lee, 1974), and performance on the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language (Carrow, 1973). Results indicated that the language-impaired subjects demonstrated significant deficits in symbolic, adaptive, and integrative play behaviors in comparison with the linguistically equivalent normal subjects. The language-impaired group also evidenced significantly more nonplay and significantly less solitary and parallel play than their normal peers. Findings are discussed with respect to the developmental relationship between language and cognition.

Purpose Conducting in-depth grammatical analyses based on language samples can be time consuming. Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) and the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) analyses provide detailed information regarding the grammatical profiles of children and can be conducted using free computer-based software. Here, we provide a tutorial to support clinicians' use of computer-based analyses to aid diagnosis and develop and monitor treatment goals. Method We analyzed language samples of a 5-year-old with developmental language disorder and an adolescent with Down syndrome using computer-based software, Computerized Language Analysis. We focused on DSS and IPSyn analyses. The tutorial includes step-by-step procedures for conducting the analyses. We also illustrate how the analyses may be used to assist in diagnosis, develop treatment goals focused on grammatical targets, and monitor progress on these treatment goals. Conclusion Clinicians should consider using Computerized Language Analysis's IPSyn and DSS analyses to support grammatical language assessments used to aid diagnosis, develop treatment goals, and monitor progress on these treatment goals. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12021141

Purpose The authors of this study investigated the validity of tense and agreement productivity (TAP) scoring in diverse sentence frames obtained during conversational language sampling as an alternative measure of finiteness for use with young children. Method Longitudinal language samples were used to model TAP growth from 21 to 30 months of age for 37 typically developing toddlers. Empirical Bayes (EB) linear and quadratic growth coefficients and child sex were then used to predict elicited grammar composite scores on the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI; Rice & Wexler, 2001) at 36 months. Results A random-effects quadratic model with no intercept best characterized TAP growth, replicating the findings of Rispoli, Hadley, and Holt (2009). The combined regression model was significant, with the 3 variables accounting for 55.5% of the variance in the TEGI composite scores. Conclusion These findings establish TAP growth as a valid metric of finiteness in the 3rd year of life. Developmental and theoretical implications are discussed.

Parental use of simultaneous communication is advocated by many programs serving hearing-impaired students. The purpose of the present study was to describe in detail the input characteristics of five hearing parents, who were attempting to use one such system, Signing Exact English or SEE 2 (Gustason, Pfetzing, & Zawolkow, 1980). The parents were intermediate-level signers, motivated to use SEE 2. Voiced and signed segments from videotaped language samples were transcribed and coded for equivalence and other features of interest. Results were that parents' signed mean lengths of utterance (MLUs) were lower than those of their children although the majority of their sign utterances were syntactically intact. Structures categorized as complex in the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure (Lee, 1974) and considered abstract in a semantic coding scheme (Lahey, 1988) were seldom used by the parents. Parents provided a narrow range of lexical items in their sign code. Results are discussed in terms of the type of input the parents are providing and the procedures used to identify priorities for parent education.

Objectives: Cleft Palate (CP) with or without Cleft Lip (CL/P) are the most common craniofacial birth defects. Cleft Lip and Palate (CLP) can affect children’s communication skills. The present study aimed to evaluate language production skills concerning morphology and syntax (morphosyntactic) in children with CLP. Methods: In the current cross-sectional study, 58 Persian-speaking children (28 children with CLP & 30 children without craniofacial anomalies=non-clefts) participated. Gathering the language samples of the children was conducted using the picture description method. The 50 consecutive intelligible utterances of children were analyzed by the Persian Developmental Sentence Scoring (PDSS), as a clinical morphosyntactic measurement tool. Results: The PDSS total scores of children with CLP were lower than those of the non-clefts children. A significant difference was found between the studied children with CLP and children without craniofacial anomalies in the mean value of PDSS total scores (P=0.0001). Discussion: Children with CLP demonstrate a poor ability for using morphosyntactic elements. Therefore, it should be considered how children with CLP use the grammatical components.

ABSTRACTPersonal event narratives and fictional stories are narrative genres which emerge early and undergo further development throughout the preschool and early elementary school years. This study compares personal event and fictional narratives across two language-ability groups using episodic analysis. Thirty-six normal children (aged 4 to 8 years) were divided into high and low language-ability groups using Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS). Three fictional stories and three personal event narratives were gathered from each subject and were scored for length in communication units, total types of structures found within the narrative, and structure of the whole narrative. Narrative genre differences significantly influenced narrative structure for both language-ability groups and narrative length for the high language-ability group. Personal events were told with more reactive sequences and complete episodes than fictional stories, while fictional stories were told with more action sequences and multiple-episode structures. Compared to the episodic story structure of fictional stories, where a prototypical ‘good” story is a multiple-episode structure, a reactive sequence and/or a single complete episode structure may be an alternate, involving mature narrative forms for relating personal events. These findings suggest that narrative structures for personal event narratives and fictional stories may follow different developmental paths. Finally, differences in productive language abilities contributed to the distinctions in narrative structure between fictional stories and personal event narratives. As compared to children in the low group, children in the high group told narratives with greater numbers of complete and multiple episodes, and their fictional stories were longer than their personal event narratives.

Background and aims The purpose of the current exploratory study was to describe the inferential narrative comprehension skills of young school-age children on the autism spectrum who, as a group, are at high risk of significant and persistent reading comprehension difficulties. Our aim was to investigate whether the anticipated difficulties in inferential narrative comprehension in the group of children with autism could be explained by the children’s structural language ability as measured using a broad-spectrum standardized language test. Methods The participants were 35 children with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), aged between 5;7 and 6;11, who attended their first year of formal schooling, and 32 typically developing (TD) children, matched to the ASD group for age and year of schooling. Children on the autism spectrum were divided into below normal limits (ASD_BNL, standard score ≤80; n = 21) or within normal limits (ASD_WNL, standard score >80; n = 14) on a standardized language test. All children participated in a narrative comprehension task, which involved listening to a novel story, while looking at pictures, and answering eight comprehension questions immediately afterwards. Comprehension questions were categorized into factual and inferential questions, with further categorization of the inferential questions into those tapping into the story characters’ internal responses (mental states) or not. Children’s responses were scored on a quality continuum (from 0: inadequate/off topic to 3: expected/correct). Results Our results showed significantly lower scores across factual and inferential narrative comprehension in the ASD_BNL group, compared to the ASD_WNL and TD groups, supporting the importance of structural language skills for narrative comprehension. Furthermore, the TD group significantly outperformed the children in the ASD_WNL group on inferential comprehension. Finally, the children in the ASD_WNL group showed specific difficulties in answering the internal response inferential questions compared to their TD peers. Conclusions Results from this exploratory study highlight the difficulties children on the autism spectrum may have in inferential narrative comprehension skills, regardless of sufficient structural language skills at word and sentence level. These findings support the importance of routinely assessing these narrative comprehension skills in children on the spectrum, who as a group are at high risk of persistent reading comprehension difficulties. Implications In this study, we demonstrate how narrative comprehension can be assessed in young school-age children on the autism spectrum. The scoring system used to categorize children’s responses may further assist in understanding children’s performance, across a quality continuum, which can guide detailed goal setting and assist in early targeted intervention planning.

Introduction: the article deals with one of psychocorrective work direction with younger schoolchildren who have developmental delay and inclusively taught at comprehensive schools. Because of psychological and pedagogical features these children are in the majority of pupils who don’t cope with traditional school curriculum requirements. For systematic and successful education any child needs potential neurobiological readiness of brain systems and subsystems that provides the development of higher mental functions necessary for schooling. The results of neuropsychological investigations demonstrate that children with developmental delay are characterized by partiality of brain systems damage with failing of separate cortical and subcortical functions and larger integrity of higher regulatory processes. The most vulnerable subcortical brain system of physically disabled children is thalamo-hypothalamic complex. Its dysfunction appears both in neurological symptoms (neurometabolic endocrine syndrome, thermoregulatory and vegetovascular dysfunction, carbohydrate metabolism disorder) and psychological problems (developmental delay, absence of orientation to adult speaking as a behavior regulator, retardation in eye-mindedness and visual active thinking formation). It is recognized that hypothalamic structures mature rhythmically. Rhythmical stimulus, coming from environment are very important for them. Understanding the laws of brain process formation we can help develop child’s brain, using external rhythms in the psychocorrective support program for younger schoolchildren with developmental delay. The method of rhythms can be used in motor sphere correction of younger schoolchildren with developmental delay. Within the context of our investigation rhythm, using in folklore is considered as a condition of motor functions development of younger schoolchildren with developmental delay. Motor correction creates a necessary basis for normal higher mental functions operation, increases total power of verbal and nonverbal thinking processes, contributes to overcoming of behavior stereotypes, produces a base for motor providing of speech and language mechanism, form skills to control own behavior, assists in coping with muscle and body tension. In such a way motor correction creates a prerequisite for full psychical processes participating in reading, writing and mathematics acquisition. Results: the article deals with the results of investigation of motor functions of younger schoolchildren with developmental delay that inclusively taught at comprehensive schools. The supplied results are before and after psychocorrective work with the using of rhythm. The measurements for result comparison are kinesthetic and dynamic praxis investigation, reciprocal movements coordination. Diagnostic tasks combined traditional psychological techniques and neuropsychological tests. After sets of samples an own system of scoring was given. Each system took into account character, degree of severity and amount of introduced mistakes. Ball scoring was determined at the base of a scale: three balls – high level of samples making (motions are carrying out correctly, fast, clear), two balls – middle level (motions are carrying out correctly, consequentially, but reaction is delayed, specularity is existed), one ball – low level (needed hands position is choosing on the basis of samples, movements are very slow, specularity, echopraxia and perseveration are existed). As a result of investigation it was found that before psychocorrective work an average ball of all samples of motion block carrying out by schoolchildren with developmental delay was 1,41 point. While examining the position of reciprocal movements coordination (slow rate, disrupted evenness, modeling of both hands) very low characteristics (1,28 point) were found. After the corrective education an average ball of all samples of motion block carrying out by schoolchildren with developmental delay was 2,33. Discussion and Conclusions: the article deals with the structure of psychocorrective work on the development of motion sphere of younger schoolchildren with developmental delay. It includes numerous motion exercises on the development of general and articulate movements, finger exercises, exercises with eponymous and heteronymous cooperation of hands, legs, eye and tong. All the exercises contribute greatly to the reciprocal coordination formation. Every exercise is carried out under the clear rhythm of folklore texts. Folklore texts kept external rhythm to constantly repeated children motions and contributed to the general rhythm of brain structure. Poetical material with clear rhythmical structure had good influence on the children’s feeling. It generated poignant interest and positive emotions, didn’t stress during plural repetition, formed motivation for lessons, decreased emotional tension, contributed to the general activity. Rhythm and switching permitted children to learn how to simultaneously listen, remember and perform motions. These skills were successfully used by children during educational activity, when it was necessary to perform some actions simultaneously, for example, to write, to reflect rules, to remember sentences and etc. So rhythm of motions contributes to the development of subcortical structures of children’s brain, help adapt younger schoolchildren to the learning environment according to the curriculum.

The paper presents research findings with 56 Roma children from Macedonia and Serbia between the ages of 3-6 years. The children’s knowledge of Romani as their mother tongue was assessed with a specially designed test. The test measures the children’s comprehension and production of different types of grammatical knowledge such as wh–questions, wh-complements, passive verbs, possessives, tense, aspect, the ability of the children to learn new nouns and new adjectives, and repetition of sentences. In addition, two pictured narratives about Theory of Mind were given to the children. The hypothesis of the authors was that knowledge of the complex grammatical categories by children will help them to understand better the Theory of Mind stories. The results show that Roma children by the age of 5 know most of the grammatical categories in their mother tongue and most of them understand Theory of Mind. References Bakalar, P. (2004). The IQ of Gypsies in Central Europe. The Mankind Quarterly, XLIV, (3&4), 291-300. Bedore L.M., Peña E.D., García, M. & Cortez, C. (2012). Conceptual versus monolingual scoring: when does it make a difference? J Speech Lang Hear Res 55(1), 1-15. Berko, J. (1958). The Child's Learning of English Morphology. Word 14, 150-177. Berman, R. & Slobin, D. (2009). Relating Events in Narrative: A Cross-Linguistic developmental Study, vol. 1. New York and London: Psychology Press. Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development: Language literacy and cognition. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Bialystok, E. & Craik, F. (2010). Cognitive and Linguistic processing in the bilingual mind. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, (1), 19-23. Bialystok, E., Craik, F., and Freedman, M. (2007). Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia. Neuropsychologia, 45, 459-464. Brucker, J. L. (n.d). A study of Barriers to Educational Attainment in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. www.unicef.org/ceecis/Roma_children.pdf Bruner, J. (1986). Actual mind, possible worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Carlson, S. & Meltzoff, A. (2008). Bilingual Experience and Executive Functioning. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6 (1), 1-15. Chen, C. & Stevenson. H. (1988). Cross-Linguistic Differences in Digit Span of Preschool Children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 46, 150-158 Conti-Ramsden, S., Botting, N. & Faragher, B. (2001). Psycholinguistic Marker for specific Language Impairment (SLI). Journal of Language Psychology and Psychiatry, 42 (6), 741-748. Curenton, S. M. (2004). The association between narratives and theory of mind for low-income preschoolers. Early Education and Development, 15 (2), 120–143. Deen, Kamil Ud (2011). The Acquisition of the Passive. In de Villiers, J. & T. Roeper. (eds) Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (pp. 155-188). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publisher. de Villiers, J., Pace, A., Yust, P., Takahesu Tabori, A., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., Iglesias, A., & Wilson, M.S. (2014). Predictive value of language processes and products for identifying language delays. Poster accepted to the Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders, Madison, WI. de Villiers, J. G. (2015). Taking Account of Both Languages in the Assessment of Dual Language Learners. In Iglesias, A. (Ed) Special issue, Seminars in Speech, 36 (2) 120-132. de Villiers, J. G. (2005). Can language acquisition give children a point of view? In J. Astington & J. Baird (Eds.), Why Language Matters for Theory of Mind. (pp186-219) New York: Oxford Press. de Villiers J. G. & Pyers, J. (2002). Complements to Cognition: A Longitudinal Study of the Relationship between Complex Syntax and False-Belief Understanding. Cognitive Development, 17: 1037-1060. de Villiers, J. G., Roeper, T., Bland-Stewart, L. & Pearson, B. (2008). Answering hard questions: wh-movement across dialects and disorder. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29: 67-103. Friedman, E., Gallová Kriglerová, E., Kubánová, M. & Slosiarik, M. (2009). School as Ghetto: Systemic Overrepresentation of Roma in Special Education in Slovakia. Roma Education Fund. ERRC (European Roma Rights Center) (1999). A special remedy: Roma and Special schools for the Mentally Handicapped in the Czech Republic. Country Reports Series no. 8 (June) ERRC (European Roma Rights Centre) (2014). Overcoming barriers: Ensuring that the Roma children are fully engaged and achieving in education. The office for standards in education. online at http://www.errc.org ERRC (European Roma Rights Centre) (2015). Czech Republic: Eight years after the D.H. judgment a comprehensive desegregation of schools must take place http://www.errc.org Fremlova, L. & Ureche, H. (2011). From Segregation to Inclusion: Roma pupils in the United Kingdom. A Pilot research Project. Budapest: Roma Education Fund. Gleitman, L., Cassidy, K., Nappa, R., Papafragou, A. & Trueswell, J. (2005). Hard words. Language Learning and Development, 1, 23-64. Goetz, P. (2003). The effects of bilingualism on theory of mind development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 6. 1-15. Hart, B. & Risley, T.R (1995). Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing Heath, S. B. (1982). What no Bedtime Story Means: Narrative skills at home and at school. In Language and Society. 11.2:49-76. Hirsh-Pasek, K., Kochanoff, A., Newcombe, N. & de Villiers, J.G. (2005). Using scientific knowledge to inform preschool assessment: making the case for empirical validity. Social Policy report (SRCD) Volume XIX, 1, 3-19. Hirsh-Pasek K., Adamson, I.B., Bakeman, R., Tresch Owen, M., Golinkoff, R.M., Pace, A., Yust, P & Suma, K. (2015). The Contribution of Early Communication Quality to Low- Income Children’s Language Success. Psychological Science Online First, June 5, 2015 doi:10.1177/0956797615581493 Hoff, E. (2013). Interpreting the early language trajectories of children from low-SES and language minority homes: implications for closing achievement gaps. Developmental Psychology, 49(1):4-14. Hoff, E. & Elledge, C. (2006). Bilingualism as One of Many Environmental Variables that Affect Language Development in Young Children. In J. Cohen, K. McAlister & J. MacSwan (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International symposium on Bilingualism (pp. 1034-1040). Somerville, Ma: Cascadilla press. Hoge, W. (1998). A Swedish Dilemma: The Immigrant Ghetto. The New York Times, October 6th. Kovacs, A. (2009). Early Bilingualism Enhances Mechanisms of False-Belief Reasoning. Developmental Science, 12 (1), 48-54. Kyuchukov, H. (2005). Early socialization of Roma children in Bulgaria. In: X. P. Rodriguez-Yanez, A. M. Lorenzo Suarez & F. Ramallo (Eds.), Bilingualism and Education: From the Family to the School. Muenchen: Lincom Europa. (pp. 161-168) Kyuchukov, H. (2010) Romani language competence. In: J. Balvin and L. Kwadrants (Eds.), Situation of Roma Minority in Czech, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia (pp. 427-465). Wroclaw: Prom. Kyuchukov, H. (2014). Acquisition of Romani in a Bilingual Context. Psychology of Language and Communication, vol. 18 (3), 211-225. Kyuchukov, H. (2013). Romani language education and identity among the Roma children in European context. In: J. Balvin, L. Kwadrans and H. Kyuchukov (eds) Roma in Visegrad Countries: History, Culture, Social Integration, Social work and Education (pp. 465-471). Wroclaw: Prom. Kyuchukov, H. (2015). Socialization of Roma children through Roma oral culture. In: Socializaciya rastushego cheloveka v kontekste progressyivnyih nauchnich ideii XXI veka: socialnoe razvitie detey doshkolnogo vozrastta. [Socialization of the growing man in the context of progressive ideas of the XXI c.: social development of the preschool age children] Proceedings form the First international All-Russia conference, 1-3 April, Yakutsk, pp. 798-802. Kyuchukov, H. & de Villiers, J. (2009). Theory of Mind and Evidentiality in Romani-Bulgarian Bilingual children. Psychology of Language and Communication, 13(2), 21-34. Kyuchukov, H. & de Villiers, J. (2014a). Roma children’s knowledge on Romani. Journal of Psycholinguistics, 19, 58-65. Kyuchukov, H. & de Villiers, J. (2014b). Addressing the rights of Roma children for a language assessment in their native language of Romani. Poster presented at the 35th Annual Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders in Madison, Wisconsin June 12-14. Lajčakova, J. (2013). Civil Society Monitoring Report on the Implementation of the National Roma Integration Strategy and Roma Decade Action Plan in 2012 in Slovakia. Budapest: Decade of Roma Inclusion. Secretariat Foundation. Landry, S. and the School Readiness Research Consortium (2014). Enhancing Early Child Care Quality and Learning for Toddlers at Risk: The Responsive Early Childhood Program. Developmental Psychology, 50 (2), 526-541. Lust, B., Flynn, S. & Foley, C. (1996). What Children Know about What They Say: Elicited Imitation as a Research Method for Assessing Children's Syntax. In D. McDaniel, C. McKee, & H. Smith Cairns (Eds.), Methods for Assessing Children's Syntax (pp. 55-76). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Maratsos, M., Fox, D.E.C., Becker, J.A. & Chalkley, M.A. (1985). Semantic restrictions on children’s passives. Cognition, 19, 167-191. Merz, E.C. Zucker, T.A., Landry, S.H. Williams, J., Assel, M., Taylor, H.B, Lonigan, C.L., Phillips, B., Clancy-Menchetti, J., Barnes, M., Eisenberg, N., de Villiers, J. (2015). Parenting predictors of cognitive skills and emotion knowledge in socioeconomically disadvantaged preschoolers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 132, 14-31 Pearson, B. Z., Jackson, J. E., & Wu, H. (2014). Seeking a valid gold standard for an innovative dialect-neutral language test. Journal of Speech-Language and Hearing Research. 57(2). 495-508. Reger, Z. (1999). Teasing in the linguistic socialization of Gypsy children in Hungary. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 46, 289-315. Réger, Z. and Berko-Gleason, J. (1991). Romāni Child-Directed Speech and Children's Language among Gypsies in Hungary Language in Society, 20 (4), 601-617. Roeper, T & de Villiers, J.G. (2011). The acquisition path for wh-questions. In de Villiers, J.G. & Roeper, T. (Eds), Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition. Springer. Seymour, H., Roeper, T. & de Villiers, J. (2005). The DELV-NR. (Norm-referenced version) The Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation. The Psychological Corporation, San Antonio. Schulz, P. & Roeper, T. (2011). Acquisition of exhaustively in wh-questions: a semantic dimensions of SLI. Lingua, 121(3), 383-407. Stokes, S. F., Wong, A. M-Y., Fletcher, P., & Leonard, L. B. (2006). Nonword repetition and sentence repetition as clinical markers of SLI: The case of Cantonese. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 49(2), 219-236. Vassilev, R. (2004). The Roma of Bulgaria: A Pariah Minority. The Global Review of Ethnopolitics, 3 (2), 40-51. Wellman, H.M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about false belief. Child Development, 72, 655-684. Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 13, 103–128.

AbstractMany studies of speech perception assess the intelligibility of spoken sentence stimuli by means of transcription tasks (‘type out what you hear’). The intelligibility of a given stimulus is then often expressed in terms of percentage of words correctly reported from the target sentence. Yet scoring the participants’ raw responses for words correctly identified from the target sentence is a time-consuming task, and hence resource-intensive. Moreover, there is no consensus among speech scientists about what specific protocol to use for the human scoring, limiting the reliability of human scores. The present paper evaluates various forms of fuzzy string matching between participants’ responses and target sentences, as automated metrics of listener transcript accuracy. We demonstrate that one particular metric, the token sort ratio, is a consistent, highly efficient, and accurate metric for automated assessment of listener transcripts, as evidenced by high correlations with human-generated scores (best correlation: r = 0.940) and a strong relationship to acoustic markers of speech intelligibility. Thus, fuzzy string matching provides a practical tool for assessment of listener transcript accuracy in large-scale speech intelligibility studies. See https://tokensortratio.netlify.app for an online implementation.

Speech and language impairments are common pediatric conditions, with as many as 10% of children experiencing one or both at some point during development. Expressive language disorders in particular often go undiagnosed, underscoring the immediate need for assessments of expressive language that can be administered and scored reliably and objectively. In this paper, we present a set of highly accurate computational models for automatically scoring several common expressive language tasks. In our assessment framework, instructions and stimuli are presented to the child on a tablet computer, which records the child's responses in real time, while a clinician controls the pace and presentation of the tasks using a second tablet. The recorded responses for four distinct expressive language tasks (expressive vocabulary, word structure, recalling sentences, and formulated sentences) are then scored using traditional paper-and-pencil scoring and using machine learning methods relying on a deep neural network-based language representation model. All four tasks can be scored automatically from both clean and verbatim speech transcripts with very high accuracy at the item level (83−99%). In addition, these automated scores correlate strongly and significantly (ρ = 0.76–0.99, p < 0.001) with manual item-level, raw, and scaled scores. These results point to the utility and potential of automated computationally-driven methods of both administering and scoring expressive language tasks for pediatric developmental language evaluation.