Jon Miller

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders

Purpose In the early 1980s, researchers and speech-language pathologists (SLPs) collaborated to develop the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT). Research and development over the ensuing decades has culminated into SALT Solutions, a set of tools to assist SLPs to efficiently complete language sample analysis (LSA) with their clients....

Purpose This exploratory study sought to establish the psychometric stability of a dynamic norming system using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) databases. Dynamic norming is the process by which clinicians select a subset of the normative database sample matched to their individual client's demographic characteristics. Metho...

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Purpose The goal of this clinical focus article is to illustrate how speech-language pathologists can document the functional language of school-age children using language sample analysis (LSA). Advances in computer hardware and software are detailed making LSA more accessible for clinical use. Method This clinical focus article illustrates how d...

Purpose: This tutorial discusses the importance of language sample analysis and how Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) software can be used to simplify the process and effectively assess the spoken language production of adolescents. Method: Over the past 30 years, thousands of language samples have been collected from typical sp...

Updates on our views on the language sample analysis (LSA) process and the release of a new version of SALT software (Miller & Iglesias, 2015) motivated creating a second edition of this book. This second edition addresses the challenges of assessing language production through the life span. The unfolding of language through childhood requires us...

Background Language sampling, recognized as a gold standard for expressive language assessment, is often elicited using wordless picture storybooks. A series of wordless storybooks, commonly referred to as ‘Frog’ stories, have been frequently used in language-based research with children from around the globe.AimsTo examine the impact that differen...

This report describes a comprehensive language transcription protocol for use with data from Persian-speaking children, along with a new version of the SALT program adapted for use with Persian and morphologically-similar languages. The need arose during the design phase of a study requiring language sample measures to be computed from transcripts...

Analysis of children's productions of oral narratives provides a rich description of children's oral language skills. However, measures of narrative organization can be directly affected by both developmental and task-based performance constraints which can make a measure insensitive and inappropriate for a particular population and/or sampling met...

Language sample analysis is considered by many to be the gold standard for documenting children's oral language skills. One limitation, however, is the time required for collection and transcription of language samples. The goal of this study was to determine if stable language sample measures could be generated using relatively short language samp...

Over the past 50 years, language sample analysis (LSA) has evolved from a powerful research tool that is used to document children's linguistic development into a powerful clinical tool that is used to identify and describe the language skills of children with language impairment. The The Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT; J. F. Mil...

To evaluate the clinical utility of the narrative scoring scheme (NSS) as an index of narrative macrostructure for young school-age children. Oral retells of a wordless picture book were elicited from 129 typically developing children, ages 5-7. A series of correlations and hierarchical regression equations were completed using microstructural meas...

The current study evaluated the relation between Spanish and English vocabulary. Whereas previously reported correlations have revealed strong differences among types of vocabulary measures used and the ages of the students tested, no prior study had used a multilevel model to control for classroom-level differences. The current study used multiple...

In working with children with language impairments, some clinical scholars and clinicians advocate using input that is simplified to the point of being ungrammatical (telegraphic input), while others advocate simplified but grammatical input. This article considers 2 types of external evidence on this topic. First, a meta-analysis of relevant resea...

Recent research documents the power of oral narrative language samples to predict reading achievement in both Spanish and English in English language learners (ELLs; J. Miller et al., 2006). To document their clinical utility, this article addresses issues of accuracy and reliability for transcription and analysis of oral narratives elicited from S...

This article examines the question: Do lexical, syntactic, fluency, and discourse measures of oral language collected under narrative conditions predict reading achievement both within and across languages for bilingual children? More than 1,500 Spanish–English bilingual children attending kindergarten–third grade participated. Oral narratives were...

This study compares 2 measures of reading comprehension: (a) the Woodcock-Johnson Passage Comprehension test, a standard in reading research, and (b) the Diagnostic Assessment of Reading Comprehension (DARC), an innovative measure. Data from 192 Grade 3 Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) were used to fit a series of latent variable a...

Unlabelled: This study examined the production of African-American English (AAE) forms produced by 69 school-aged African-American children from middle socio-economic status (SES) communities to determine if age would influence: (a) the number of different types of AAE tokens and (b) the rate of dialect. Descriptive data revealed that there were m...

A New Zealand (NZ) database has been created comprising conversational and narrative spoken language samples from 268 children aged between 4;5 and 7;6 years. This paper addresses several questions related to the development and validation of the database and provides a comparison of this NZ database with an American database of language samples. A...

Two studies of the use of cognitive state predicates by children with specific language impairment (SLI) were conducted. Study I analysed longitudinal language samples collected from 26 children with SLI and 25 children with normal language (NL) development, aged 4;4 and 2;11, respectively, at Time I. Study II analysed samples from SLI children wit...

Two studies of the use of cognitive state predicates by children with specific language impairment (SLI) were conducted. Study I analysed longitudinal language samples collected from 26 children with SLI and 25 children with normal language (NL) development, aged 4;4 and 2;11, respectively, at Time I. Study II analysed samples from SLI children wit...

Time requirements inherent in transcription and analysis of spontaneous language samples represent a significant barrier to the regular use of language sample analysis in clinical settings. Taking advantage of the options provided by new large, fast, and affordable personal microcomputers, two language analysis programs, the Systematic Analysis of...

This study explored developmental changes and effects of Down syndrome on mothers' structuring of their children's play. Mothers and their young children with Down syndrome (n = 28) were compared with socioeconomically matched samples of mothers and their mental age-matched (n = 28) and chronological age-matched (n = 28) typically developing childr...

This study investigated the validity of a parent report measure of vocabulary development, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences (CDI), in children with and without developmental disabilities. Concurrent validity was examined by comparing results from the CDI and laboratory measures of vocabulary in 44 children with...

Children with Down syndrome offer an opportunity for investigators interested in cognition and language problems to study asynchronous development of vocabulary, and syntax in language production relative to comprehension and cognitive status. Our work to date has documented consistent differences in the rate of vocabulary learning in children with...

This longitudinal investigation charted the course of cognitive and language development from the prelinguistic period to multiword productions in 19 typically developing (TD) toddlers and 4 toddlers who were subsequently identified as having late onset of expressive language. Assessments were conducted at 3-month intervals over a 21-month period,...

This investigation compared the effectiveness of two language treatment methods, modeling versus modeling plus evoked production, in promoting productive vocabulary in three toddlers identified as late talkers. A single-subject alternating treatments design was employed in this study in which different sets of words were taught under the two treatm...

Samples of conversational language were elicited with a standardized interview protocol from 24 children, aged 2:6 to 7:8, half with specific language impairment (SLI), half with normally developing language (LN), matched for language level. Samples were analyzed to determine whether there were associations between adult questioning and children's...

Describes the development and use of the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts by J. Miller and R. Chapman (1982). This computer program was designed to analyze language transcripts from children and adults in a variety of speaking conditions. Conversational and narrative language samples were audiorecorded from each of the 192 children parti...

Microcomputer-aided analysis of spontaneous language-speech samples offers researchers an efficient means of analyzing large amounts of data. It may be necessary, however, to format samples for more than one software program in order to obtain comprehensive morpho-syntactic and phonetic/phonologic analyses. This paper suggests a procedure for the c...

This book covers recent research with neurobiological and cognitive features of Down syndrome. This book covers recent research with neurobiological and cognitive features of Down syndrome. There has been notable progress in understanding the psychobiological concomitants of Down syndrome. New data have pinpointed selective neurological defects, an...

Early receptive and productive language skills were examined for preterm low birthweight infants and full-term normal birthweight infants from middle-class homes. Nineteen preterm infants and 19 full-term infants were observed in a laboratory setting at the gestationally corrected age of 8 months. To avoid the frequent confound between prematurity...

The speech of mothers and their 1-year-old infants was compared in the home and in the laboratory playroom. The home and laboratory settings were similar for measuring the number of actual words that infants spoke and were similar for measuring the complexity of the mother's speech, including the number of different words, the type-token ratio, and...

This paper takes issue with the current trend towards establishing universal criteria for the development and review of software designed for children with speech and language problems. Language intervention is a unique teaching activity, and computer applications require tailored solutions. We propose a shift in perspective, moving away from compu...

The paper presents a daily analysis of the language recovery of a patient who was globally aphasic at the time of her first observation and who had recovered language, as measured by the Western Aphasia Battery, at the time of her discharge 14 days later. The paper emphasizes the relatively regular growth of normal syntactic, lexical, and pragmatic...

Research conducted at the Waisman Center on Mental Retardation and Human Development over the past 10 years documents the multidimensional nature of the development of children's language in retarded and nonretarded populations. Recent advances in research methodology now available for investigating language comprehension and production will allow...

The relationship between child age and mean length of utterance measured in morphemes (MLU) was studied in a sample of 123 middle- to upper-middle-class midwestern children, aged 17 to 59 months, conversing with mothers in free play. A significant correlation was found between age and MLU: r = .88. Age accounted for 78% of the variance when MLU was...

The goal of early language intervention is to teach children the community language resulting in a functional communication system. This enterprise presumes the early identification of children at risk for impaired communication development and strategies that sustain facilitation of language acquisition when initiated early in life.

A cross-sectional study of language comprehension in relation to cognitive functioning in 48 to 10-to-21 month old children, 4 at each month of age, revealed significant correlations between comprehension and five sensorimotor subscales. Age, however, was the only significant predictor in multiple regression analyses adding either age or sensorimot...

Comprehension and production of subject object order in semantically reversible sentences with animate or inanimate subject and object were studied in an object manipulation paradigm. 3 Groups of 5 children each, averaging mean utterance length 1.8, 2.4, and 2.9 morphemes, respectively, participated. Children preserved subject object order with res...

The present study was designed to determine which of three indices of sentence length most effectively predicted pre-schooler's correct sentence imitations : total number of words; number of content words only; or the density of content words within a sentence. Twenty-four pre-school children, mean age 3.11 years, were asked to imitate 32 sentences...

Short term memory (STM) for three types of auditorily presented stimulus material was tested in 28 children with articulation deficits and 28 children with normal articulation. The stimulus material consisted of digit, random word, and sentence strings that varied from four to 10 units in length. The group with good articulation performed significa...

Children's awareness of selection restriction rules in sentences was investigated in 2 groups of children, 4-8 to 5-3 years and 6-8 to 7-3 years of age. The 32 children were asked to identify anomalous and meaningful sentences as either "silly" or "okay." Information about the Ss' use of selection restriction rules was acquired by having them conve...

Surface structure complexity, transformational sentence type and sentence length were investigated as variables in a sentence imitation task with pre-school children. Sentences were varied on Yngve depth (High-Low), transformational sentence type (active, negative, wh- question and passive) and sentence length (5-9 words). Sentence length was found...

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.