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Review
. 2016 May;37(2):74-84.
doi: 10.1055/s-0036-1580742. Epub 2016 Apr 25.

Your Laptop to the Rescue: Using the Child Language Data Exchange System Archive and CLAN Utilities to Improve Child Language Sample Analysis

Nan Bernstein Ratner  1 , Brian MacWhinney  2
Affiliations
Review

Your Laptop to the Rescue: Using the Child Language Data Exchange System Archive and CLAN Utilities to Improve Child Language Sample Analysis

Nan Bernstein Ratner et al. Semin Speech Lang. 2016 May.

Abstract

In this article, we review the advantages of language sample analysis (LSA) and explain how clinicians can make the process of LSA faster, easier, more accurate, and more insightful than LSA done "by hand" by using free, available software programs such as Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN). We demonstrate the utility of CLAN analysis in studying the expressive language of a very large cohort of 24-month-old toddlers tracked in a recent longitudinal study; toddlers in particular are the most likely group to receive LSA by clinicians, but existing reference "norms" for this population are based on fairly small cohorts of children. Finally, we demonstrate how a CLAN utility such as KidEval can now extract potential normative data from the very large number of corpora now available for English and other languages at the Child Language Data Exchange System project site. Most of the LSA measures that we studied appear to show developmental profiles suggesting that they may be of specifically higher value for children at certain ages, because they do not show an even developmental trajectory from 2 to 7 years of age.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Mean length of utterance (MLU) values from prior research reports for children at 24 months of age. Abbreviation: sd, standard deviation. Note: Current = Newman et al, n = 122; Rice cohort is 2 years, 6 months to 2 years, 11 months; combined n from other studies = 68.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Developmental sentence score (DSS) values from Newman et al (2015) and reference values reported by Lee and derived from the Child Language Data Exchange System van Houten corpus. Abbreviation: sd, standard deviation.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Index of Productive Syntax values for Newman et al (“current”), Scarborough, and van Houten corpus (Child Language Data Exchange System archive). Abbreviations: sd, standard deviation.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Correlations between mean length of utterance (MLU) and Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) (A) and MLU and developmental sentence score (DSS) (B).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Correlations between Developmental Sentence Score (DSS) and Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn).
Figure 6
Figure 6
Mean length of utterance (MLU) values for a cohort of 630 children speaking North American English in the Child Language Data Exchange System archive.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Distribution of Developmental sentence score (DSS) and Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) scores for 630 children in the Child Language Data Exchange System archive.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Distribution of type-token ratio (TTR) and Vocabulary Diversity (VocD) values for 630 children in the Child Language Data Exchange System archive.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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