Scribd
Upload
172 views

Language Analysis

Noah, aged 3 years and 7 months, was assessed using the South Tyneside Assessment of Syntactic Structures (STASS). Results showed Noah performing at level 3, below the expected level 5 for his age. Analysis of Noah's language skills found his morphology and syntax to be below typical developmental norms. While Noah demonstrated use of pronouns, prepositions, and some regular past tense verbs, he had not yet mastered auxiliaries, plurals, or other grammatical structures typically acquired by age 3. Overall, Noah's language abilities were assessed to be below what is expected for his chronological age based on standardized language assessments and developmental frameworks.

Uploaded by

Yvette Edmans
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
172 views

Language Analysis

Noah, aged 3 years and 7 months, was assessed using the South Tyneside Assessment of Syntactic Structures (STASS). Results showed Noah performing at level 3, below the expected level 5 for his age. Analysis of Noah's language skills found his morphology and syntax to be below typical developmental norms. While Noah demonstrated use of pronouns, prepositions, and some regular past tense verbs, he had not yet mastered auxiliaries, plurals, or other grammatical structures typically acquired by age 3. Overall, Noah's language abilities were assessed to be below what is expected for his chronological age based on standardized language assessments and developmental frameworks.

Uploaded by

Yvette Edmans
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 8

Analyse the responses and put them on the STASS – Rapid Assessment Score

Sheet.
Scan this to accompany your evaluation of the child’s language use.

Evaluate the child’s performance in this assessment (1000 words)

The South Tyneside Assessment of Syntactic Structures (STASS) is an assessment


focusing on spoken language communication in the form of prompted/elicited
speech. It’s targeted for deaf children but not exclusively, to screen for language or
development delays and assist in development of the English grammatical system
(Armstrong and Ainsley, 2012).

Noah has the chronological age of 3;7, by this age he should be developing at level
5 in the STASS rapid assessment. Browns Stages framework (Brown, 1973) can be
used to understand what stage of expressive language development we expect from
Noah at his age in terms of morphology and syntax. Brown’s stages structurally
analyse spoken language to determine children’s developmental age, looking at
capacity of learning grammatical structure at greater complexity as age increases.
Noah’s chronological age should put his language ability at stage 4 based off typical
norms. This means in terms of morphological structure it’s expected that the skills of
regular past tense, third person and present tense language, and use of articles are
present. In the stages before this children should be able to use present progressive,
regular and possessive plurals, irregular past tense, and uncontractible copulas
(Brown, 1973).

Results obtained from STASS show Noah is at level 3. There were some examples
of regular past tense in response 9, there was no present tense ‘get’, but “got”
examples in responses: 3,8,15. Third person pronouns were used regularly in
responses: 2,3,4,7,14,15,18,19,20a,20b,21,25,30,31,32.

Noah showed good use of pronouns and prepositions, examples of prepositions in


responses: 2,5a,5b,13a,13b,18,23,24a,24b,25,29. However there was no genitive
use of possessive ‘s’ or examples of auxiliaries displayed by Noah, something we’d
expect to see. “Where my shoe” displays the use of question (Q) determiner noun
(DN) with clause level: QX, phrase level: DN and expansions: X+S:NP all staging at
level 2. Noah missed the plural possessive ‘s’ on “shoes”, and the verb ‘are’. Noah
uses prepositions with prep DN phrase structure in responses 5a,5b,24a, 24b and
space relation vocabulary in 13a and 13b.

Noah did not present any clause level 4 vocabulary, and at the lower levels he had
gaps in: AX, SVC, SVA, VC and SVOA which 75% of children use by age 4. Noah
presents at clause level 3 and shows lots of examples of SVO sentences, such as
responses 2, 4, 25, and response 17 which also uses personal pronouns and other
pronominal pronouns. The SVO sentence “don’t like medicine” includes a intensifier
(IntX), a contraction Vpart – verb+particle, with “don’t” the NegV contracted
negative, a modal auxiliary in negative form of ‘does’. This is the only example of
word level 3 vocabulary Noah used. NegX examples were seen in responses 3, 15
and 30.

Looking at Noah’s phonological response to picture 3 “he got no eyes” he produced


a SVO clause with pronoun use and a negation word (NegX) “no eyes”, an example
of undeveloped use of negatives at stage 2 clause level as it is not part of the verb
but integrated within the sentence. With his use of pronoun “he got” Noah omitted
the contracted primary auxiliary verb ‘have’, removing the additional meaning
expressing contrast in tense and aspect (Crystal and Fletcher, 1975). By the age of
3, 75% of children typically develop auxiliary use therefore putting Noah behind
developmental norms. Noah is however on track with his pronoun use, using both
singular and plural pronouns in first, second and third person and strong subjective
form: he, his, I, it, they, she, that, you and my.

There was one example of a regular plural noun in Noah’s responses. Although it is
to be credited for use of the free morpheme ‘eye’ with its inflectional bound
morpheme to create ‘eyes’, the word is most often said in its plural form rather than
singular (Owens, 2015). When looking at Noah’s score sheet this is the only example
of a stage 2 word level plural, so is questionable whether Noah has yet obtained this
language skill. This tells us that Noah is behind the developmental norms for this
grammatical structure as by age 3 children should typically be using plurals.

Looking at word level, Noah is not yet using any auxiliaries and there were few
examples of plural, -ed and -n’t words. This grammatical ability puts him way behind
the level he should be, where he should be confidently using -ing, -en, 3s and show
the ability of ‘cop and ‘aux vocabulary by age 3. 3 rd person singular -ed examples
were displayed in responses 19, 20b and 30. The response “they swimmed” had SV
clause level, DN phrase level at stage 2, and expansions X+S: NP. This shows Noah
acquiring the rules of language and developing ability to use -ed endings, but has not
yet perfected with incorrect use. This semantic issue leads to Noah’s semantic
development.

Looking at Noah’s semantic development, in response 10 with the other pronominal


he used the concept of size with the mitigator “little”, and in response 11 concepts of
speed were used with “slow”. The adjective is missing -ly ending, although Noah
cannot yet use adverbial suffix at word level, at 4 years only 25% typically can
transform adjectives into adverbs so this isn’t a concern.

At phrase level Noah is using the phrase patterns: DN, AdjN, PrepN, PrepDN, Pron
and PrepAdjN. He is at level 3 phrase development which is below his age
expectations. Something that Noah did use confidently was DN, examples are seen
in responses: 6,8,16,18,24b,26,29,31 where determiners provide information about
the noun they premodify. Lots of these used were possessive determiners, for
example response 31 “He wear his t-shirt”, the SVO statement utterance begins with
the initiator pronoun “he” and contains possessive determiner “his”; the development
of this is an important sign of progress in noun phrases. Additional phrase level
responses used regularly were prepositions and PrepDN, specifically space relations
including: inside, under, behind, besides and in front. There weren’t any examples of
time/logical relation prepositions in Noah’s answers, but STASS focuses particularly
on space relation prepositions which are the first to develop.

References:
Armstrong, S & Ainley, M (2012) South Tyneside Assessment of Syntactic Structures (STASS 2).
Northumberland: STASS Publications.

Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Crystal, D., Fletcher, P. (1975) Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure
(LARSP) University of Reading.

OWENS, R. (2015) Language Development: an introduction, EBook, Global Edition. 9th ed. Harlow:
Pearson Education, Limited.

You might also like