Assessing Expressive Language Samples of ECE Students Case Study

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A sample of 25 intelligible utterances obtained during an observation in the clinic, in which Jay played and interacted with his mother, provided the basis for the language analysis. The following assessments were conducted: MLU, DSS, Correct/Incorrect Form Analysis, and Type Token Ratio.

Mean Length of Utterance (MLU). Although Roger Brown's five stages of language development differ from the scoring used in the MLU interpretation in this paper, Jay is scores within normal limits in this second version, also. Brown describes a MLU score of 3.0 to 3.75 as Stage IV of language development, which corresponds with an approximate age of 35 to 40 months. Jay has reached 41 months of age at the time of this evaluation, which puts him in Stage V of language development, with corresponding ages of 41 to 46 months. Jay's MLU score is 3.5, which may be interpreted to indicate that Jay is moderately behind in language development on this particular scale. As has been noted in this report, Jay may quite simply prefer to use shorter sentences. But what is of particular interest is that the phrases and shorter sentences appear to be less accurate than the few longer sentences that Jay speaks.

Developmental Sentence Score (DSS). Jay scores in the normal range for grammatical sentence construction, however, his sample of 25 intelligible utterances spans the spectrum from one word utterances to well-spoken requests, such as: "When are we gonna do that?" And, "I want some of those people." Jay tends to use pronouns more often than he names of labels things. Therapists refer to children who us many pronouns as pronominal children, and recognize that these children tend to use sentence structure earlier than nominal children, who ten to use names to describe things. Jay appears to just be starting to use negation, which is a robust demonstration of language development in his age group. Jay's parents and ECE teachers can encourage Jay to begin using conjunctions to link those short sentences and phrases he seems to prefer.

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Correct/Incorrect Form Analysis. Parents and teachers are encouraged to continue modeling clear and simple models for expressive language, taking a zone of proximal development approach. For example, to provide scaffolding to Jay's expressive language, his ECE teachers and his parents may wish to make frequent past tense, regular third person references. Supplying a narrative about the activities of others can provide manageable models for Jay to emulate. For instance, say: "Morgan pulled the wagon. He pulled the wagon to our house." Or, "Curious George jumped down. He jumped down from the tree." And so on. Expressive language models will need to be mindful to use fewer irregular verbs, and to supply proper nouns and prepositions in close proximity.

Type Token Ratio (TTR). Since normally developing children between the age of 3 and 8 years of age have TTRs of .45 to .50, it seems as though Jay's TTR ratio is within normal range. However, there are two important things to consider in this interpretation: The utterances sample is small, consisting of only 25 individual intelligible utterances. And Jay is characteristically a "man of few words." Since Jay's sentences are not long, his sample is sparse, not dense with words. This may have elevated his percentage, suggesting that additional samples should be gathered in different circumstances to explore the impact of novelty and other contextual factors on Jay's production of words.

Summary Recommendation. Although earlier reports indicate that Jay was delayed in expressive language, he is currently reaching developmental milestones at an acceptable rate. The expressive and receptive language patterns that Jay exhibits is commonly seen among young boys. Against the background of Jay's male-typical normal-to-advanced gross motor skills, there does not seem to be much evidence to support an intervention at this time. The recommendation from this assessment is to adapt a wait-and-see position, re-evaluating Jay at six-month intervals until he….....

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