AJSLP Research Article Percent Grammatical Utterances Between 4 and 9 Years of Age for the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument: Reference Data and Psychometric Properties Ling-Yu Guo, a,b Sarita Eisenberg, c Phyllis Schneider, d and Linda Spencer e Purpose: The purpose of this article was to provide the reference data and evaluate psychometric properties for the percent grammatical utterances (PGU; Eisenberg & Guo, 2013) in children between 4 and 9 years of age from the database of the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI; Schneider, Dubé, & Hayward, 2005). Method: Participants were 377 children who were between 4 and 9 years of age, including 300 children with typical language (TL) and 77 children with language impairment (LI). Narrative samples were collected using the ENNI protocol (i.e., a story generation task). PGU was computed from the samples. Split-half reliability, concurrent criterion validity, and diagnostic accuracy for PGU were further evaluated. Results: PGU increased significantly in children between 4 and 9 years of age in both the TL and LI groups. In addition, the correlation coefficients for the split-half reliability and concurrent criterion validity of PGU were all large (rs ≥ .557, ps < .001). The diagnostic accuracy of PGU was also good or acceptable from ages 4 to 9 years. Conclusions: With the attested psychometric properties, PGU computed from the ENNI could be used as an assessment tool for identifying children with LI between 4 and 9 years of age. The reference data of PGU could also be used for monitoring treatment progress. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha. 9630590 G rammatical deficits are a hallmark of English- speaking children with language impairment (LI; Leonard, 2014). As compared to children with typical language (TL), children with LI tend to show re- duced productivity and complexity in using morphological and syntactic structures in spoken discourse (e.g., Eisenberg, 2003; Hewitt, Hammer, Yont, & Tomblin, 2005). Children with LI also demonstrate lower accuracy in producing grammatical structures than children with TL (e.g., Souto, Leonard, & Deevy, 2014). The grammatical errors produced by children with LI may include, but are not limited to, tense marking errors (Leonard, Haebig, Deevy, & Brown, 2017; Rice, Wexler, & Hershberger, 1998), personal and relative pronoun errors (Moore, 2001; Schuele & Tolbert, 2001), argument structure errors (Ebbels, van der Lely, & Dockrell, 2007; Grela & Leonard, 1997), and errors with grammatical morphemes other than pronouns and tense markers (e.g., infinitive to, dative preposition to, particles such as put on the shirt; Arndt & Schuele, 2012; Grela, Rashiti, & Soares, 2004; Watkins & Rice, 1991). The diffi- culty in accurately using grammatical structures by children with LI is observed during the preschool years and may persist into the school-age years (Guo & Schneider, 2016; Lee, 1974). Because even just one grammatical error would make a sentence ungrammatical, evaluating the extent to which children are able to produce grammatical sentences may reflect their ability in using grammatical structures. Lee (1974) first created a grammaticality measure—sentence point—to count the number of grammatical sentences a child produced in 50 different sentences extracted from a Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, Asia University, Taichung City, Taiwan b Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, University at Buffalo, NY c Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Montclair State University, Bloomfield, NJ d Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada e Master of Science in Speech-Language Pathology Program, Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions, Provo, UT Correspondence to Ling-Yu Guo: lingyugu@buffalo.edu Editor-in-Chief: Julie Barkmeier-Kraemer Editor: Stacy Betz Received September 23, 2018 Revision received February 18, 2019 Accepted May 11, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_AJSLP-18-0228 Disclosure: The authors have declared that no competing interests existed at the time of publication. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology • Vol. 28 • 1448–1462 • November 2019 • Copyright © 2019 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association 1448 Downloaded from: https://pubs.asha.org Ling-Yu Guo on 03/04/2020, Terms of Use: https://pubs.asha.org/pubs/rights_and_permissions