Is assessment of pragmatic skills of young children part of your SLP job?

In my position as a school-based Speech Pathologist, I perform assessments on children from the age of 30 months and older.  In Wisconsin, the eligibility criteria requires that a child score at or below 1.75 standard deviations below the mean on  2  standardized tests as one prong of the eligibility criteria for speech and language services.

Asssessment-Two tests on squirmy students?

It’s been challenging to find 2 different standardized tests to give to toddlers and preschool-aged children.  Many are non-verbal or minimally-verbal, too active to tolerate lengthy testing and/or have behavioral or sensory challenges.  Before I had the LUI (Language Use Inventory), I would  either use informal measures or use the Preschool Language Scale (PLS) and a vocabulary measure.  I sometimes felt I was doing two different assessments.  One to meet the qualifying criteria for the state and the other to truly understand the child’s strengths and limitations.  I liked using parent questionnaires as part of my evaluations but there wasn’t a standardized one available for this age group.

Assessment: Standardized Parent Report: LUI

Then, I ordered the Language Use Inventory (LUI) by Dr. Daniela O’neill from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.  The LUI is a parent questionnaire designed to identify children, aged 18-47 months, with delays in pragmatics or social communication.   It also identifies children whose expressive language skills require further evaluation.  It’s STANDARDIZED so I can now obtain valuable parent input while meeting a prong of the state eligibility criteria.  Perfect for the numerous children referred for communication evaluations with either autism spectrum diagnoses.  The LUI has been a valuable part of a comprehensive language assessment with these children!

Advantages of the LUI

•  It examines gestural and verbal communication.  You can tell a mother of a nonverbal child that her son’s gestural communication is a strength substantiated by a formal score!  If the child is not using at least one word, only the gestural portion can be completed.  However,  you still obtain your standardized score!
• Parents find it easy to use.  It examines the types of words used by the child (animals, foods, people, body parts, prepositions etc).
• For the verbal child using longer sentences, it examines the child’s questions and comments and their use of language to interact with people.  I experienced a learning curve with scoring the LUI but now they offer online scoring.   The SLP provides a link to the parent and they access the questionnaire by computer.   Once the parent submits the completed LUI,  a report will appear in your private account.

Here’s the link to the Language Use Inventory website and a link to the Journal of speech, language and hearing research article written by Dr. Daniela O’neill about the LUI.
               

 I am not affiliated with the developers of the Language Use Inventory!!  

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 Have you used the LUI?            Please comment!