Exploring the Utility of a School-Age Narrative Microstructure Index: Proportion of Restricted Utterances

• Published in: Language, speech & hearing services in schools Vol. 47; no. 2; pp. 171 - 180
• Main Authors: Jerger, Sara, Thorne, John C
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Speech-Language-Hearing Association 01.04.2016
• Subjects: Age; Alcohol; Anatomy; Child; Child Language; Children; Children & youth; Childrens picture books; Coding; Comparative Analysis; Disability Identification; Error Patterns; Evidence Based Practice; Family Income; Female; Fetal Alcohol Syndrome; Gifted; Humans; Language; Language disorders; Language Disorders - diagnosis; Language Impairments; Language Tests; Male; Morphology (Languages); Narration; Narratives; Oral Language; Sample size; School districts; School Psychologists; Semantics; Semiotics; Sensitivity and Specificity; Sentences; Speech Language Pathology; Statistical Significance; Studies; Syntax; Transcripts (Written Records)
• ISSN: 0161-1461; 1558-9129
• DOI: 10.1044/2015_LSHSS-15-0021

Purpose: This research attempted to replicate Hoffman's 2009 finding that the proportion of narrative utterances with semantic or syntactic errors (i.e., = 14% "restricted utterances") can differentiate school-age children with typical development from those with language impairment with a sensitivity of 83% and specificity of 88%. Method: Methods similar to Hoffman (2009) were used to evaluate an existing set of narratives from 16 age-matched pairs of 8- to 9-year-old children, half with known language impairment. Transcripts were segmented into T-units; a code of [RESTRICTED] was assigned to any utterance with semantic or syntactic errors. Results: A Welch's t test for independent samples revealed a statistically significant difference in the mean proportion of restricted utterances between the two groups after accommodation for an outlier with typical development. A cutoff of = 14% restricted utterances replicated Hoffman's (2009) sensitivity but not specificity. Post hoc analysis of specific error types found sensitivity and specificity rates similar to Hoffman's as well as a significant difference in means when using a proportion of sentence-internal morphosyntactic errors. Conclusion: Results support further exploration of utterance-level error coding for diagnostic purposes and future development of this approach to meet clinical assessment needs.