September 2003
Volume 16, Number 9
Rice/Wexler Test
Mabel Rice of the University of Kansas and Ken Wexler of Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed the first comprehensive test to identify children with Specific Language Impairment. The Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment, published in 2001, is now used worldwide.
Rice, a former speech pathologist, has been a language advisor to children's TV program such as "Sesame Street" and "Dora the Explorer." In 1985 she started the Language Acquisition Preschool, in which one third of the students are normal English-speaking preschoolers, one third are diagnosed with SLI, and one third are learning English as a second language.
"The trick is to be able to set that up in a way that the children will interact with each other and also with the teachers," Rice explains. One day's activity might be a "let's pretend" visit to a fast food restaurant where the children rotate the roles of customers and clerks. Another day they might give a baby doll a bath.
The proof of the program is in its results - preschoolers with SLI progress faster. If their impairment is not too severe they catch up to their age-mates in language skills by the time they enter kindergarten, and even those with more severe impairment "improve immensely."
It was precisely these circumstances that spawned TEGI - a test for specific grammatical markers of SLI that Rice and Wexler identified in their research. The test, intended for children from age three to eight, uses interactions with puppets and other toys to focus on specific rules of grammar, the most telling of which is whether the child misuses certain verb forms. Failing to use the "ed" for the past tense or the forms of "to be" and "to do" in framing questions, for example, is a red-flag indicator. "We know that if children do poorly [on these measures], it's likely to be because they are language impaired," Rice says.
Over and over she gets the same request from parents, explaining how their child is perceived as intellectually slow or socially immature. "These messages come from concerned families who feel it's important to know the nature of their child's difficulty. The alternative model suggests that the children have these problems because the mothers were not doing a good job parenting them. It turns out some youngsters can have very good parenting and just not benefit from it the way others do."
Additional information about SLI and the Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment can be accessed at www.merrill.ku.edu/IntheKnow/sciencearticles/SLIfacts.html.
