Clinical Utility of proportion of Restricted Utterances

What is it about?

This research attempted to replicate Hoffman's 2009 finding that a simple accounting of utterances with any type of grammatical during a story-telling task may differentiate school-age children with typical development from those with language impairment. While results failed to replicate Hoffman's findings, results indicated that a specific set of grammatical errors (which excluded word-choice errors, tense errors, and pronoun errors) was effective at discriminating between the groups.

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Why is it important?

Replication is an endeavor at the heart of the scientific enterprise and is particularly important for building the evidence base for clinical practice. These findings support the idea that a simple utterance-level accounting of errors may be an effective tool for clinical assessment aimed at identifying language disorders in school-aged children, and motivate further research to validate the approach for clinical use.