Some Notes on Lee and Canter's "developmental Sentence Scoring: a Clinical Procedure for Estimating Syntactic Development in Children's

This paper discusses Lee and Canter's procedure for assessing child language development as an example of how psycholinguistics is beginning to enter the language clinic. The procedure includes recording and transcribing examples of children's sentences, then scoring them to yield a Developmental Sentence Score (DDS). This procedure was compared to two other measures of child language development, a word-morpheae count and an inflection acquisition measure. Lee and Canter's procedure is considered especially significant in that it is based on the actual production of a child, but a main objection is that their approach is not linguistically oriented enough, so that their definition of what constitutes a sentence overlooks valuable information. (Am)