A Comparison of Four Informal Methods of Language Evaluation

Abstract

Four informal methods of language evaluation were compared: spontaneous language sampling, elicited imitation, sentence completion, and grammatical judgment. Thirty children from two age levels (4–5 and 6–7 years) with diagnosed language problems were tested with each of these evaluation procedures. Overall comparisons between tasks revealed significant correlations between spontaneous sampling, elicited imitation, and sentence completion. However, when these tasks were examined with regard to individual syntactic structure, a highly variable pattern of comparability was observed. None of the task comparisons involving grammatical judgment reached statistical significance. The implications of these findings for the clinical application of the four evaluation procedures are discussed.