"Didn't I just say that?" Comparing parent report and spontaneous speech as indicators of grammatical development.
Manya Jyotishi, Deborah A Fein, Letitia R Naigles
PMID 28042974WHAT IT FOUND
Parents often missed grammar their children actually used, especially pronouns and past tense.
This was most marked for less verbal children with autism, so a speech sample is needed before assuming a grammar is absent.
Key findings
01Mothers accurately confirmed a higher percentage of their children's grammatical productions at later visits than at early visits across all groups.
02Approximately one-third of mothers' 'does not say' responses at early visits were contradicted by the child's same-day speech, and this overlooking was significantly higher at later visits for the middle-verbal ASD group.
03Pronouns were especially likely to be overlooked in all three groups, and past tense was also missed at higher-than-average rates in the high-verbal ASD group.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only children with ASD who were verbal were included, so the findings may not apply to children who have not yet developed speech. The Vineland was sometimes stopped after three 'does not say' responses, so some grammar items were not administered or analysed for some children. The sample was small and some item-level comparisons had fewer administrations, especially for typically developing and high-verbal ASD groups at later visits. The study did not check the opposite error: parent report of 'says' when the child did not produce the item in the transcript. After excluding nonverbal children, the ASD subgroups were not matched to the typically developing group on expressive language, so group comparisons are not fully clean.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that parent report is useless for language assessment. Mothers accurately confirmed many child productions, and confirmation was higher at later visits. The caution is that parent report can miss specific grammatical forms that the child produced in the same-day speech sample.