A research study to examine the manners of assessing or scoring language samples

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Authors
Stringer, Charlene J.
Advisor
Issue Date
1984
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Thesis (M.A.)
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Abstract

One aspect of diagnosis included in most speech evaluations involves an assessment of the child's language abilities. The speech pathologist may assess these language abilities through language sampling procedures. After the samples have been obtained, the pathologist must have an adequate method with which to analyze the samples. Several methods of analyzing the collected data have been developed to assist the pathologist with this task. Some of them are: Mean Length of Utterance (Brown, 1973), 14 Grammatical Morphemes (Brown, 1973, and de Villers and de Villers, 1973), Developmental Sentence Scoring (Lee, 1974), Language Assessment, Remediation, and Screening Procedure (Crystal, Fletcher, and Garman, 1976), and Language, Sampling, Analysis, and Training (Tyack and Gottsleben, 1974). A few of these scoring procedures have been standardized to provide scores which have been compared to the age scores of other diagnostic language tests. However, to date, little research has been done comparing these forms of analyzing language samples to see if they yield similar results when applied to the same sample. As speech pathologists, this information is an important aspect of the proper diagnosis of any potential client's language behavior. The different means used for analysis require some type of inter-test correlation, so that the pathologist can be certain that the results obtained are at least measuring the same thing.It is the purpose of this study to examine the manners of analyzing language samples of children by comparing the results of the assessment procedures chosen. The children will not be compared to each other, but each individual child's sample will be assessed in three different manners, and these three assessment procedures compared against each other to see if the results obtained are similar. It is not the purpose of this study to look for the best form of scoring a language sample, but to look for correlations among the sample scoring procedures.

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