Elucidating the effects of different definitions of ‘utterance’ on selected syntactic measures of older children's language samples

Abstract Utterances comprising corpora of language samples are fundamental units underlying many syntactic measurements of older children's language performances. This exploratory study examined the effects of the utterance definitions for T-unit, C-unit, Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS), and Tone unit on seven measures of syntax in language samples of 10 normally achieving 11-year-old males. The effect of definition was statistically significant for all of the measures, with post hoc analyses identifying the definitional sources(s) of the differences. Although inter- and intra-rater reliability was high for measurement calculation, there was considerable inter-rater variation for utterance segmentation for one of the definitions. These findings have implications for research and clinical practice.

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