Assessing Sentences in Young Children: A Comparison of the Sentence Diversity Priming Task and Play-Based Language Samples.
Windi C Krok, Tracy Preza, Emily K Harrington and 4 others
A structured priming task gave more diverse third-person subjects and verbs in about 10 minutes than a 10-minute play sample, and both methods separated late talkers from typically developing peers.
It is a valid, time-efficient alternative for assessing sentence diversity in 30- to 38-month-olds.
Key findings
1The SDPT elicited significantly more diverse third-person subjects than the play sample (TD mean 12.44 vs 2.43; LT mean 8.48 vs 1.60), with a large effect size (eta-p-squared = .734). The SDPT also elicited more diverse verbs (TD 15.42 vs 13.04; LT 10.85 vs 8.58).
2All general language measures (utterances, NDW, MLU) and both sentence-focused diversity measures differentiated late talkers from typically developing children in both sampling contexts.
3Measures from the two contexts were positively correlated: NDW r = .62, MLU r = .71, verb diversity r = .58, third-person subject diversity r = .32 (all p < .001). The association for third-person subject diversity was the weakest.
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What it does not show
The analytic sample was 77.4% White, 94% monolingual English, and 84.7% of mothers had a college degree or higher. The authors note this differs from the broader W2W cohort and from the general population. The comparison was against a 10-minute play sample. The authors acknowledge that the current gold standard for sentence diversity assessment is 30 minutes of scripted clinician-child play, and differences might be smaller against that longer benchmark. This is a single time-point validation. The paper does not show whether SDPT scores predict later language outcomes, track progress over time, or function as a dynamic assessment. The authors list all of these as ongoing work. The SDPT measures supported performance, not typical unaided performance. A clinician should not interpret a low SDPT score the same way as a low play-sample score. No concurrent comprehension measure was collected, so it is unknown whether children who did not benefit from the prime sentences did so because of a comprehension gap.
Declared interests
Funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (R01DC016273) and the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH107652). No industry funding, no conflicts of interest declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as 'the SDPT replaces the play-based language sample.' The two methods are related but not identical: third-person subject diversity correlated only weakly across contexts (r = .32), and the SDPT measures performance under built-in support rather than unaided performance. The sample was 77% White and monolingual, so generalisability to a full caseload is untested. This is a validation of an assessment tool, not evidence that any intervention works.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →