Syntactic Complexity

Note: These tables are in Excel format. You can use the Excel file to obtain standard scores by entering the raw scores in the red box; the adjoining boxes will show the z-score and standard score for the raw score you entered.

Mean Length of Communication in Words (MLCU), Number of Different Words (NDW) and Total Number of Words (TNW) were obtained using SALT with the transcript of all 6 stories. SALT calls these MLU-W, No. of Different Word Roots, and No. Main Body Words (the last two are under TTR for the whole transcript -- not TTR for 50 or 100 utterances). The entire transcript was used for these measures. The Analysis Set was set to exclude the following: abandoned and interrupted utterances, unintelligible utterances, nonverbal utterances, and yes/no responses to questions.

Although there is a table for 6 year olds, MLCU and CI do not discriminate well between children with and without language impairments at 6 years, and thus scores should be used with particular caution.

* Be sure to change only the numbers in the red boxes.