Differentiating language-impaired and normal-language children using a storytelling task

This study investigated linguistic productions of language-impaired (LI) and normal-language (NL) children on a storytelling task and speech-language clinicians' impressions of those productions. Twenty LI children currently enrolled in speech-language therapy and twenty NL control children participated in the study. Half were kindergarten and half first grade children of various ethnicities. The ratio of boys to girls was three to one. The Test of Language Development-Primary (TOLD-P) (Newcomer, & Hammill, 1982) and Slosson Intelligence Test (Slosson, 1985) were administered. The children told a story to speech-language clinicians after viewing a cartoon movie about toothbrushing (Mendelson, & Melendez, 1978). The situation and instructions were constant for all children and included an incentive for them to tell well planned stories. 15 certified speech-language pathologists with a minimum 5 years experience in public school settings, read a transcription of each story and decided if it would pass or fail a speech-language screening. The two groups differed in mean length of utterance (MLU), (...