Elicitor Effects on the Language Obtained from Young Language-Impaired Children

Abstract

Language samples are typically obtained during speech and language evaluations by the speech-language pathologist to assess the level of expressive language development of young children. These samples are assumed to be accurate representations of the children’s language skills. This study examines the effects of the elicitor on the language obtained from three- to six-year-old language-impaired children in a clinical setting. A corpus of nonimitated utterances was collected in 25 min from each of the nine subjects under two conditions: mother as elicitor and clinician as elicitor. The corpus of language collected under each condition was examined using the following measures: (1) numeric-number of utterances; (2) lexical-vocabulary type-token ratio: (3) grammatic-mean length of utterance, (4) percentage of one-morpheme utterances, (5) percentage of two-morpheme utterances, (6) percentage of three- or more morpheme utterances, (7) proportion of grammatical morphemes per utterance (8) semantic-percentage occurrence of semantic categories, and (9) type-token ratio for each of the 13 semantic categories. The data analysis revealed that the elicitor affected the number of utterances collected in a specific time period, but neither the lexical, grammatic, nor semantic aspects of the utterances were affected. The results state practical implications for evaluation procedures used in a clinical setting.