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Purpose: The purpose of this article was to provide the reference data and evaluate psychometric properties for the percent grammatical utterances (PGU; Eisenberg & Guo, 2013) in children between 4 and 9 years of age from the database of the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI; Schneider, Dubé, & Hayward, 2005).
Method: Participants were 377 children who were between 4 and 9 years of age, including 300 children with typical language (TL) and 77 children with language impairment (LI). Narrative samples were collected using the ENNI protocol (i.e., a story generation task). PGU was computed from the samples. Split-half reliability, concurrent criterion validity, and diagnostic accuracy for PGU were further evaluated.
Results: PGU increased significantly in children between 4 and 9 years of age in both the TL and LI groups. In addition, the correlation coefficients for the split-half reliability and concurrent criterion validity of PGU were all large (rs > .557, ps < .001). The diagnostic accuracy of PGU was also good or acceptable from ages 4 to 9 years.
Conclusions: With the attested psychometric properties, PGU computed from the ENNI could be used as an assessment tool for identifying children with LI between 4 and 9 years of age. The reference data of PGU could also be used for monitoring treatment progress.
Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha. 9630590
Grammatical deficits are a hallmark of Englishspeaking children with language impairment (LI; Leonard, 2014). As compared to children with typical language (TL), children with LI tend to show reduced productivity and complexity in using morphological and syntactic structures in spoken discourse (e.g., Eisenberg, 2003; Hewitt, Hammer, Yont, & Tomblin, 2005). Children with LI also demonstrate lower accuracy in producing grammatical structures than children with TL (e.g., Souto, Leonard, & Deevy, 2014). The grammatical errors produced by children with LI may include, but are not limited to, tense marking errors (Leonard, Haebig, Deevy, & Brown, 2017; Rice, Wexler, & Hershberger, 1998), personal and relative pronoun errors (Moore, 2001; Schuele & Tolbert, 2001), argument structure errors (Ebbels, van der Lely, & Dockrell, 2007; Grela & Leonard, 1997), and errors with grammatical morphemes other than pronouns and tense markers (e.g., infinitive to, dative preposition to, particles such as put on the shirt; Arndt & Schuele, 2012; Grela, Rashiti, & Soares,...