Purpose: Several studies have demonstrated that dynamic assessment can be a less biased, valid approach for the identification of language disorder among diverse school-age children. However, all prior studies have included a relatively small number of participants, which is generally not adequate for psychometric research. This is the first…

Early identification of language delay is important as it has a serious impact on a child's life in terms of educational, social, and emotional development. Among the early language screening tools, there are some parent-administered tools; however, they are not culturally appropriate or freely available. This article documents the development and…

Background: The Language Development Survey (LDS) and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI) are two parental report forms that have been productive in providing data on early child language during the past 30 years. The instruments have been used both in studies relating to typical developing children and in screening…

Purpose: This study aimed to develop and validate a screening questionnaire for the early identification of language difficulties in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking preschool children. Method: The article is divided into two studies. In the first study, we reported the theoretical principles that guided the development of the Screening for…

In this survey a presentation of the difficulties of students with mild intellectual disabilities is performed. Intellectual disability is a neurodevelopment diagnosis and it refers to children who have developmental, adaptive behavioural and cognitive difficulties compared to their peers. Intellectual disabilities are categorized by their…

This study's purpose was to modify the Screening Tool for Autism in Two-Year-Olds (STAT) into a Taiwanese version called T-STAT. Study 1 included 15 children with Autism and 15 children with Developmental Delay (DD) or language impairment (LI) aged between 24 and 35 months. Study 2 had 77 young children with Autism, PDD-NOS, or DD/LI as a…

Purpose: To demonstrate the internal reliability and discriminative validity of the Language Use Inventory for Young Children (LUI; D. K. O'Neill, 2002), a newly developed parent-report measure designed to assess pragmatic language development in 18-47-month-olds. Method: To examine internal reliability, the LUI was completed by mail by 177…

This study compared differences in preschool children (n=201) clinically diagnosed with specific language impairments (SLI) who were and were not identified through standard psychometric discrepancy criteria. A combination of mean length of utterance, percent structural errors, and chronological age was found to be more useful for predicting a…

A study of 319 individuals with autism (ages 3-43) and 113 other subjects found that a single set of criteria, as operationalized by individually structured questions in the Autism Diagnostic Interview and Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised, was effective in differentiating autism from mental disabilities and language impairment. (Author/CR)

The validity of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (Third Edition) for identification and description of language disorders following brain injury was evaluated in 11 adolescents with traumatic brain injury. In general, the measure identified only those individuals who had previously been diagnosed as language impaired, not those…

Two studies are reported demonstrating the reliability, validity, and clinical utility of the Language Development Survey (LDS) as a screening tool for the identification of expressive language delay in toddlers. The LDS test-retest reliability was .97. The LDS also correlated highly with other measures and the LDS identified at-risk group scored…

A study of 20 preschool children with specific language impairments and 20 typical preschool children examined the extent to which norm-referenced tests can identify a language impairment and determine specific areas of deficit. Results indicate the norm-referenced tests gave high discriminate capacity but inconsistent item-level performance.…

This study examined test characteristics of the Pediatric Language Acquisition Screening Tool for Early Referral-Revised (PLASTER-R), a set of developmental questionnaires for children 3 to 60 months of age. The PLASTER-R was moderately to highly successful in identifying children within normal limits for language development. Test-retest…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of using the Observational Checklist of Conversational Skills to facilitate early teacher referral of 37 primary-level children suspected of having language problems and 37 age-matched peers. Twenty-five of the at-risk group scored at least 1.5 standard deviations below the mean; 27 were subsequently referred…

This study compared four commonly used vocabulary tests to screen or identify preschool children for specific language impairment (SLI). Four- and five-year olds with (N=31) and without (N=31) SLI were compared on the tests. Despite moderate to strong inter-test correlations, no test was a strong identifier of SLI. (Author/DB)