Friday, February 27, 2015

Language Use Inventory: Standardized Assessment of Pragmatics in Young Children

In my position as a School-based Speech Pathologist, I evaluate children from the age of 30 months and older.  In Wisconsin, the state's eligibility criteria requires that a child score at or below 1.75 standard deviations below the mean on  2  standardized tests as one prong of the eligibility criteria for speech and language services.  In the past, it's been challenging to find 2 different standardized tests to give to toddlers and preschool-aged children who are non-verbal or minimally-verbal, are too active to tolerate lengthy testing and/or have behavioral or sensory challenges.  Before I had the LUI (Language Use Inventory), I would typically either use informal measures or use the Preschool Language Scale (PLS) and a vocabulary measure.  I sometimes felt I was doing two different evaluations:  one to meet the qualifying criteria for the state and the other to truly understand the child's strengths and limitations related to communication.  I liked using parent questionnaires as part of my evaluations but there wasn't a standardized one available for this age group...until now!

In the fall of 2014,  my school district and I ordered the Language Use Inventory (LUI) by Dr. Daniela O'neill from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.  The LUI is a parent questionnaire designed to identify children, aged 18-47 months, with delays in pragmatics or social communication and to identify children whose expressive language skills require further evaluation.  It's STANDARDIZED so I can now obtain valuable parent input AND it meets a prong of the state eligibility criteria.  It came just in time as I had numerous children referred for communication evaluations with either autism spectrum diagnoses or who were in the process of being evaluated at UW Madison's Waisman Center to confirm or rule out such a diagnosis.    The LUI has been a valuable tool to use as part of a comprehensive speech and language evaluation with these children!

I have been pleased with the LUI and here's what I like about it.   It examines gestural as well as verbal communication.  It felt so good to tell a mother of a nonverbal child that her son's gestural communication was a strength substantiated by a formal test score!  If the child is not using at least one word, only the gestural portion can be completed but you will still obtain your standardized score!  Parents find it easy to use and it examines the types of words used by the child (animals, foods, people, body parts, prepositions etc).    For the verbal child using longer sentences, it examines the child's questions and comments and their use of language to interact with people.  I experienced a learning curve with scoring the LUI but now I see they offer online scoring where the SLP provides a link to the parent and they acsess the questionnaire by a computer (in your office or their home).   Once the parent submits the completed LUI,  a report will appear in your private account.

Here's the link to the Language Use Inventory website so you can check it out for yourself as well as a link to the Journal of speech, language and hearing research article written by Dr. Daniela O'neill about the LUI.
                 I am in no way affiliated with the makers of the Language Use Inventory!!  The opinions
                                           expressed in this piece are soley my own!!


                   Have you used the LUI?  Please comment on your experiences with it!            

                                                                    Donna

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