Event Date and Time
-
Location
Lefrak 2208
Thomas Kovacs of University of Pittsburgh will be presenting on Assessing tense and agreement morphology in typically developing children and children who use AAC.
Abstract: Expressive morphology skills are rarely assessed in children who use augmentative and
alternative communication (AAC). Children who use AAC may therefore have undocumented
difficulty acquiring morphemes that are known to be problematic for verbally speaking children,
such as morphemes in the English tense and agreement system. I will present a project using
theoretically driven tasks to assess the tense and agreement systems of a cross-sectional sample
of typically developing 30-54 month olds. Play-based language samples were used to assess
tense and agreement morpheme productivity for all participants. Then, a series of structured
stimulability tasks were used to assess stimulability of 15 different tense markers. Children were
randomly assigned to one of two testing modalities: the spoken modality or the graphic symbol
modality (i.e. using a speech generating device). I will also present a case study showing how
these same measures were used to identify developmentally appropriate intervention goals for a
child with cerebral palsy who uses a speech generating device.
