By Joan Slattery Wall
Speech-language pathologists often use standardized tests to assess a child's ability to speak and understand words and sentences. But a new study suggests that for children with Specific Language Impairment, those tests often don't tell the full story.
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| Sally Marinellie |
Ohio University Assistant Professor Sally Marinellie suspects a child's full potential may be hidden by results from conventional assessment tests for Specific Language Impairment (SLI for short), a language disorder that affects a child's ability to use and understand language. As many as 8 percent of kindergartners in the United States have the disorder, according to the Merrill Advanced Studies Center at the University of Kansas. Even though children with SLI may not often speak in complex sentences -- those with more than one verb -- they often have knowledge of those sentences, said Marinellie, whose research is funded by a Scholarly Activity Award from the College of Health and Human Services.
In a study of 18 elementary school-age children with SLI, Marinellie used a technique called "priming" to prompt the kids to use a complex sentence. The participants were asked to describe a picture, following a sentence Marinellie spoke before showing each child the picture. For example, she gave the child a sample sentence, such as "The little boy is painting while his mother sews," and asked the child to repeat it. She then showed the child a picture of a man cooking with people standing around him. When asked to describe what he saw, children in the study were likely to use a similar sentence to the one Marinellie used in her example: "The man is cooking while his family watches."
Marinellie is encouraged that such a simple technique can reveal so much about a child's knowledge and suggests that with more research, standardized tests used to assess language expression and comprehension could be supplemented with different types of analysis such as a priming task.
"If we can get children with these kinds of language problems to use more complex sentences," she said, "they might be able to better express themselves, tell better stories and improve their writing."
Joan Slattery Wall is assistant editor of Ohio Today.
