Language Disorders:from Infancy through Adolescence:

Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, and Communicating

Rhea Paul, PhD, CCC-SLPProfessor, Yale Child Study Center

New Haven, Connecticut

Courtenay F. Norbury, PhD

Senior Research Fellow Department of Psychology Royal Holloway University of London London,England

pages 252-256

assessing lexical production

when a child fails to produce a form,we don't know whether that failure is reflection of the fact that the form is really absent from the repertoire or whether the child just didn't feel like producing it.this problem is especially acute for children with emerging language for two reason.first,their rate of communicative behavior is relatively low,so the samples we get from them are fairly sparse,second,children in the emerging language stage often just don't comply with requests from adults,particularly with requests to talk or name things.for these reasons,parent-report instruments or those that allow parent report as on source of data are especially useful for this age group.

assessing semantic-syntactic production

if a client is producing fewer than 50 words ,we would be wiser to work on increasing expressive vocabulary size before trying to get the child to produce word combinations.

詞彙要達到50個左右

relative frequency of word combinations

semantic relations expressed

semantic relations categories used by brown to account for the majority of word combination's in toddler's spontaneous speech

attribute-entity(big shoe)

possessor-possession(mommy nose)

agent-action(daddy hit)

action-object(hit ball)

agent-object(daddy ball)

demonstrative-entity(this ball )

entity-locative(daddy chair,daddy's in the chair)

action-locative(throw chair,throw it onto the chair)

recurrence(more milk)

nonexistence,denial,rejection(no cookie)

disappearence(allgone cookie)

we should teach more words that the child can use to express them and provide increased opportunities in play contexts for the client to encode these relations with the new words.in addition,we can supply models in appropriate play contexts for the client to hear other relations expressed and give opportunities,through indirect language stimulation,for the child to imitate these models.

assessing production in a child with emerging language involves looking at phonological skills, vocabulary size and content,and semantic-syntactic combinations.

decision making based on assessment information

providing help to children who are slow to learn to talk serves an important secondary prevention function and ought to be considered if the child is known to be at risk.

sample transcript from a 28 months old child collected during free play with parent using dollhouse toys(p,255)