LSHSS Research Article Finite Verb Morphology Composite Between Age 4 and Age 9 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 study was to provide reference data and evaluate the psychometric properties for the finite verb morphology composite (FVMC) measure 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 included 377 children between age 4 and age 9, including 300 children with typical language and 77 children with language impairment (LI). Narrative samples were collected using a story generation task. FVMC scores were computed from the samples. Split-half reliability, concurrent criterion validity, and diagnostic accuracy for FVMC were further evaluated. Results: Children’s performance on FVMC increased significantly between age 4 and age 9 in the typical language and LI groups. Moreover, the correlation coefficients for the split-half reliability and concurrent criterion validity of FVMC were medium to large (rs ≥ .429, ps < .001) at each age level. The diagnostic accuracy of FVMC was good or acceptable from age 4 to age 7, but it dropped to a poor level at age 8 and age 9. Conclusion: With the empirical evidence, FVMC is appropriate for identifying children with LI between age 4 and age 7. The reference data of FVMC could also be used for monitoring treatment progress. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha. 10073183 A hallmark of English-speaking children with lan- guage impairment (LI) is the protracted develop- mental trajectory for learning to consistently use tense and agreement morphemes (Leonard, Haebig, Deevy, & Brown, 2017; Rice, Wexler, & Hershberger, 1998). Tense and agreement morphemes (hereafter, tense morphemes) in English refer to the inflections (e.g., third-person singular –s as in The dog run s every day) or function words (e.g., auxiliary be as in The boys are laughing) that give informa- tion pertaining to person, number, and time in sentences. In both spoken discourse and experimental probes, preschool children with LI were more likely to omit tense morphemes than those with typical language (TL) development (Goffman & Leonard, 2000; Leonard et al., 2017; Rice et al., 1998). The difficulty that children with LI have with using tense morphemes may persist even into the school-age years (Moyle, Karasinski, Ellis Weismer, & Gorman, 2011; Rice et al., 1998). Although there are different theoretical expla- nations for this tense morpheme deficit (see Leonard, 2014, for a review), there appears to be a consensus that it can be used as a clinical marker for identifying children with LI (Pawlowska, 2014; Tager-Flusberg & Cooper, 1999). There are several different methods for calculating tense usage by English-speaking children from language a Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, State University of New York at Buffalo b Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, Asia University, Taichung, Taiwan 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 MSSLP Program, Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions, Provo, UT Correspondence to Ling-Yu Guo: lingyugu@buffalo.edu Editor-in-Chief: Holly Storkel Editor: Marleen Westerveld Received March 8, 2019 Revision received May 18, 2019 Accepted July 25, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_LSHSS-19-0028 Disclosure: The authors have declared that no competing interests existed at the time of publication. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools • Vol. 51 • 128–143 • January 2020 • Copyright © 2020 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association 128 Downloaded from: https://pubs.asha.org Ling-Yu Guo on 03/04/2020, Terms of Use: https://pubs.asha.org/pubs/rights_and_permissions