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ABSTRACT: Purpose: This clinical exchange reviews two independent phonological assessment measures: mean babbling level (MBL) and syllable structure level (SSL). Both measures summarize phonetic inventory and syllable shape in a calculated average and have been used in research to describe the phonological abilities of children ages 9 to 36 months. An example of the measures' clinical use is presented.
Method: Six studies reporting MBL and SSL were reviewed. Combined, the studies included 207 participants. One hundred twenty-eight of those were developing language as expected, and 79 were identified as having speech-language impairment.
Conclusion: Overall, the studies indicate that SSL is a reliable measure that increases as children develop. Children with language impairment exhibit lower SSL scores than children with typical language skills. Further, a lower than expected MBL is predictive of a lack of meaningful speech at 24 months of age.
Implication: MBL and SSL have clinical application in terms of initial evaluation as well as progress monitoring. Recommendations for standardized corpus inclusion procedures are presented.
KEY WORDS: babbling, syllable structure, phonological development, assessment, language impairment
There is a documented synergy between development of the speech sound system and development of other aspects of language (see Paul, 1998, for an overview). This relationship is particularly true during the toddler years and encompasses several language domains. Stoel-Gammon's (1991) data on normally developing 2-year-olds showed a strong correlation between the number of consonants in a child's phonetic inventory and his or her vocabulary size. That is, children who produce more words generally have more sounds in their speech sound inventories. Further, typically developing children are selective about the new words they attempt during the first-words stage of development (10 to 14 months; Schwartz & Leonard, 1982). For example, toddlers are more likely to produce a new word if the word shape and the sounds in the word are similar to other words in their spoken vocabulary. In fact, the fewer words that children have in their spoken vocabularies, the more particular they are. This characteristic is known as lexical selectivity.
Because the main objective in early intervention is to increase communication, carefully choosing specific lexical targets based on phonological as well as semantic and syntactic characteristics will likely maximize results. Taken together, phonological measures such as...