A short screening test for identification of expressive syntactic problems of kindergarten children

Abstract

The speech pathologist is responsible for the evaluation and remediation of the phonologic, semantic, and syntactic problems of his clients. Speech pathologists employed by school systems are also responsible for the identification of children with these problems as they enter school. This writer interprets phonologic to refer to speech sounds, semantic to refer to vocabulary, and syntactic to refer to the grammar of the language (Lee, 1969). Specifically, syntax involves "the grammatical relationships underlying kernel sentence constructions and transformational operations" (Lee, 1970). Tests for identification of these problems must be able to be administered rapidly. This writer's clinical experience in the schools indicates that such tests should take no longer than from one to two minutes to administer. In most school settings, several hundred children need to be evaluated. Tests taking longer than one or two minutes are simply not practical when dealing this many children. A review of instruments presently available indicates that such a test is not available for the identification of children with expressive syntactic problems. One example of present instruments is the Northwestern Syntax Screening Test (Lee, 1969) which measures expressive and receptive syntax. In the expressive section of this test, the child is shown two pictures representing contrasting syntactic items.