Are Parents of School-Age Children Valid Reporters of Their Children's Grammatical Skills?

It’s important for speech language pathologists to learn about children’s grammar because grammar deficits are often a sign of a language impairment. For this experiment, researchers had parents and speech language pathologists fill out a checklist (Children’s Communication Checklist-2), to report on children communication skills, and then we compared the results. We learned that parents and speech language pathologists both identified speech deficits in children but that parents are not sensitive to differences in their children’s grammar.  

Featuring: Jane (Janie) Sommer Eppstein, Ph.D. Student; Vanderbilt University

Interviewer: Melanie Schuele, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Hearing and Speech Sciences and a Vanderbilt Kennedy Center Member

What is The Promise of Discovery?

“The Promise of Discovery” is a podcast hosted by the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center that highlights research in intellectual and developmental disabilities. The goals of the podcast are to host conversations about research in plain language and to highlight “real world” implications. The discussions cover why the research matters in the lives of people with disabilities and families, how the research impacts and enhances what we know already and/or raises additional questions in the field, and what implications the research might have for policy.