Sentence diversity (Hadley et al., 2018)

Purpose: This clinical focus article describes how to assess and when to target diverse, simple sentences as part of early language intervention.Method: The theoretical foundations and clinical motivations for assessing sentence diversity based on unique combinations of subjects and verbs are explained, followed by a description of how to compute the measure. Sentence diversity is then related to familiar developmental measures of lexical diversity, utterance length, and grammatical complexity in a sample of 40 typically developing toddlers at 30 months of age. Descriptive and correlational analyses are used to demonstrate how sentences become more diverse as utterances also become longer and more complex.Conclusions: The ability to produce simple sentences with diverse subject–verb combinations is proposed as a general developmental expectation for toddlers at 30 months of age. All 40 children produced at least 10 different subject–verb combinations in 30 min of parent–toddler conversation. Sentence diversity is also associated with familiar developmental measures. Recommendations are provided for using the measure of sentence diversity to inform treatment planning and monitor progress for young children with language disorders.Supplemental Material S1. Computing sentence diversity.Supplemental Material S2. Subject diversity by four levels of mean length of utterance (MLU). Supplemental Material S3. Index of Productive Syntax items and their relation to English sentence structure. Hadley, P. A., McKenna, M. M., & Rispoli, M. (2018). Sentence diversity in early language development: Recommendations for target selection and progress monitoring. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27, 536–552. https://doi.org/10.1044/2017_AJSLP-17-0098

目的：本临床焦点文章旨在阐述如何评估以及在早期语言干预中何时针对多样化、简洁的句子。方法：文章首先解释了基于独特的主语和动词组合的句子多样性评估的理论基础和临床动机，随后描述了计算该指标的方法。接着，将句子多样性与40名30个月大、正常发育的幼儿的词汇多样性、言语长度和语法复杂度的常见发展指标进行关联。通过描述性和相关性分析，展示了随着言语的长度和复杂度的增加，句子变得更为多样。结论：提出产生具有多样化主语-动词组合的简单句子是30个月大的幼儿的一般发展预期。在30分钟的亲子对话中，所有40名儿童均至少产生了10种不同的主语-动词组合。句子多样性也与熟悉的发展指标相关。针对利用句子多样性指标来指导治疗计划以及监测幼儿语言障碍患者的进展提出了建议。补充材料S1：句子多样性的计算。补充材料S2：基于言语平均长度（MLU）四个级别的主体多样性。补充材料S3：生产性句法项索引及其与英语句子结构的关系。Hadley, P. A.，McKenna, M. M.，& Rispoli, M.（2018）。早期语言发展中的句子多样性：关于目标选择和进展监测的建议。美国言语-语言病理学杂志，27，536–552。https://doi.org/10.1044/2017_AJSLP-17-0098