To Develop A Scale Of Syntactic Comprehension Ability For Mandarin-Chinese Speaking Children

This research reports on the development a scale of syntactic comprehension ability for Mandarin-Chinese speaking children. The aim of the scale is in an attempt to evaluate the syntactic ability of preschool children in Mainland China, and to provide a handy testing tool for screening out children with specific language impairment (SLI) suspected and at-risk.This scale is based on The Scale of Mandarin-Chinese Speaking Children’s Language Development of Ning (2011b). The test items and the experimental data are taken from its subtests as syntactic test of Zong (2011) and semantic test of Chen (2011). We carry on a further analysis for these items and data:deleting some improper items and by using the statistical software SPSS, the subjects are given reasonable group division into four groups:3;00,3;06;4;00and5;00to6;05. Then the statistical software Winsteps is employed to select automatically the more suitable test items separately for the children in each group. On these bases, we develop four syntactic comprehension subscales. Furthermore, the item reliability, validity, the test information function and regressive analysis are in turn to be statistically analyzed. All the results prove these four subscales are all reasonable and effective. Finally, the subjects are analyzed to screen out children with SLI suspected and at-risk.In the end, some opinions and suggestions are given so as to provide a reference for future research.