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!!