Language Foundations
This term refers to the ability to understand spoken or written language.
What is receptive language?
These should guide the clinician’s choice of assessment tools before the clinician begins testing.
What are the referral concerns and clinical questions?
This refers to the consistency or stability of a measurement.
What is reliability
One independent clause plus any dependent clauses attached to it is called this.
What is a C-unit?
Name the three basic steps in the dynamic assessment cycle.
What are test, teach, and retest?
Difficulty with word meanings, abstract vocabulary, figurative language, and inference points toward this domain.
What is semantics?
Difficulty understanding multiple-meaning words, abstract vocabulary, and word relationships falls primarily within this language domain.
What is semantics
A comprehensive language evaluation should combine this rather than relying on one test score.
What are multiple sources of evidence?
This tells us how well a test or cutoff correctly identifies children who actually have the disorder.
What is sensitivity?
Pauses, repetitions, interjections, and revisions that occur while a speaker formulates an utterance are called these.
What are mazes?
This term describes how a child’s performance changes in response to teaching or support.
What is modifiability?
Difficulty managing topics, interpreting indirect language, and repairing communication breakdowns points toward this domain.
What is pragmatics?
Frequent errors with verb tense, grammatical morphemes, and complex sentence structures suggest difficulty in this domain.
What is morphosyntax
A teacher reports that a student struggles to explain ideas, but the clinician administers only a receptive vocabulary test. What is the problem with this assessment plan?
The assessment does not adequately address the referral concern/clinical question.
This tells us how well a test or cutoff correctly identifies children who do NOT have the disorder.
What is specificity?
A student produces 20 C-units, and 17 are grammatically acceptable. What is the PGU?
What is 85%?
Leah initially does not clearly explain cause and effect. After brief teaching, she correctly uses 'because' on a new example. What important behavior has she demonstrated?
Generalization of the taught strategy.
A student remembers accurate facts but has trouble organizing them into a clear explanation with transitions and supporting details. Which type of discourse should you assess?
What is expository discourse?
A student answers concrete questions well but struggles to infer, justify, explain, and organize ideas. Why might the difficulty become more noticeable as the student gets older?
School-age language becomes increasingly complex, decontextualized, and academic.
Standardized testing, teacher report, and a language sample do not agree. What should the clinician do next?
Investigate why the sources differ and collect additional evidence if needed.
A test has high sensitivity but low specificity. What type of classification error should concern you?
Too many false positives / identifying children without the disorder as having it.
A fifth grader includes the important events in a story but uses vague pronouns and few causal connections. What is one strength and one concern?
Strength: event recall/content. Concern: cohesion/relationships among ideas.
A child improves, but only after repeated models, multiple prompts, and substantial clinician support. What should the clinician pay attention to besides the fact that the child improved?
The amount/type of examiner support or effort required.
A student performs much better when given written directions, graphic organizers, models, and sentence frames. Why is this finding clinically useful?
It identifies supports that help the student access language and demonstrate knowledge and may guide assessment/intervention.
A bilingual student earns a low language score. Before interpreting the score as evidence of disorder, the clinician should consider these four broad influences on performance.
Language background, culture, experience/exposure, and opportunity to learn.
When interpreting any piece of assessment data, what are the two questions we have repeatedly asked in this course?
What does this tell me, and what does it NOT tell me?
A student earns a standard score of 78. Why should the clinician avoid treating 78 as a perfectly precise representation of the student’s ability?
Because measurement contains error; the score is an estimate and should be interpreted with the SEM/confidence interval.
Why might a clinician collect a narrative or expository sample even if the child sounds relatively strong in casual conversation?
Different discourse contexts place different and often greater language demands on school-age students.
A child demonstrates very high modifiability. Can the clinician conclude that the child does not have a language disorder? Explain.
No. Modifiability is one piece of evidence and must be integrated with the rest of the evaluation.
Across testing, language samples, and classroom evidence, a student performs well with simple, familiar, structured language but struggles as language becomes more abstract, complex, and independent. What makes this pattern more convincing than one low test score?
The concern spans multiple domains/sources and has a functional impact.