Speech therapy and audiology

“He said ‘Mama’!”

“Dada,” “mama,” “pee pee,” “blankie,” “stroller”… How many words does a 14-month-old understand? How many words should an 18-month-old child be able to say? A two-year-old? And at what age should a child understand the difference between ‘above’ and ‘below,’ ‘you’ and ‘me’, ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’? “Surprisingly, Quebec speech therapists have very few reliable and standardized tools at their disposal to evaluate language acquisition among young children,” states Professor Ann Sutton, of the Department of Speech Therapy and Audiology at UdeM and a researcher with a specialty in language acquisition.

To bridge this gap, a team from the Department headed by colleague Natacha Trudeau is currently conducting research to validate a Quebec-French version of the MacArthur questionnaire, a tool widely used in English to evaluate the vocabulary and syntax of children between the ages of 8 and 30 months.

“The MacArthur questionnaire was developed about a decade ago in the United States and has been adapted in several languages, including French from France,” explains Professor Sutton. “We explored the possibility of using the French questionnaire, but too many words were different. That’s why Ms Trudeau and some colleagues decided to adapt the questionnaire to Quebec French.”

Parents will be asked to complete the adapted questionnaire, which includes a range of Quebec-specific words like ‘bassinette,’ ‘bibitte’, ‘zip’ or ‘mononcle’. Parents are provided with a list of some 600 terms or communicative gestures and they must check off those that their child understands and those that their child uses. To standardize the questionnaire, it will be completed by the parents of 50 children for each one-month age bracket, between eight months and two-and-a-half years. In total, 1,200 children will be evaluated. To date, 800 questionnaires have been completed.

This project, which started in January 2003, is funded by the Canadian Language & Literacy Research Network. The children participating in the study must be unilingual francophone, that is, they must be exposed to French 85% of the time or more. Since they will serve as a reference for establishing standards in each age group, they must not have any known developmental, language or hearing problems. “The goal of the research is to verify if the questionnaire draws an accurate portrait of vocabulary and syntax acquisition and that it can help to predict certain language abilities,” explains Isabelle Marsolais, a bachelor’s student in speech therapy who is assisting the researchers in data collection and processing.

To further validate the questionnaire, 100 of the 1,200 parents who are participating in the study will be asked to complete the questionnaire a second time. The language skills of their children will also be evaluated. A sample of the child’s language will be obtained by filming a game-playing session between parent and child in the lab. Then, six months later, the same parents will be asked to complete the questionnaire a third time. Once the questionnaire has been standardized and validated, it will be ready for use in a clinical setting.