Medidas de evaluación del lenguaje espontáneo en niños hispanohablantes en edad preescolar

This study investigated spontaneous language measures (SLM) derived from a narrative task among Spanish-speaking (SS) preschool children to provide clinicians with developmental data on SLM and to examine whether SLM show changes in development for SS preschool children. A total of 110 monolingual SS children participated in this study. Children were divided into 3 age groups: 3, 4, and 5 years of age. Two general language measures were collected from the children: a standardized receptive vocabulary measure (Test de Vocabulario en Imágenes, TVIP), and a parental report of speech and language problems (PRSLP). In addition, four developmental language measures were calculated from a language sample collected using a story-retelling task: number of T-units (NU-TU), mean length of T-units (MLTU), subordination index (SUB-I), and grammatical errors per T-unit (GRE-TU). No statistically significant differences were found between the age groups on the standard scores for the TVIP or problem scores for the PRSLP, showing that the age groups were comparable. Increasing developmental patterns were found for NU-TU, MLTU and SUB-I. These data represent an important step in the characterization of typical language development for Spanish-speaking children. The use of the means and standard deviations obtained in this study may assist clinicians and researchers in the identification of potential language disorders in SS children.