Abstract:
The transition into primary school is a time of substantial language development for children, not just in terms of vocabulary and grammar, but also a greatly increased ability to process and produce abstract language. Blank and her colleagues developed an approach to abstract language, using questions, that led to intervention techniques and a published, standardised, and norm-referenced assessment: the Preschool Language Assessment Instrument – 2nd edition (PLAI-2). It is used by New Zealand Speech- Language Therapists to assess abstract language skills despite its being designed for use with children in the United States and there being no normative information for New Zealand children. In the current study, the PLAI-2 was administered to 40 five-year-old children with typical development, who were attending mainstream schools in Auckland, and who had had five months or more at school. The results showed that the NZ sample performed similarly to the US normative sample on Levels I, II, and III of the test, but achieved significantly and substantially higher scores as a group on Level IV. This high achievement was also seen in Discourse Ability Scores and Expressive scaled scores while the mean Receptive scaled score was not significantly different from the US mean. These results do not confirm the step-wise increase in difficulty for the four levels that the PLAI-2 presents for the US sample, since Level III and Level IV were of similar difficulty in the NZ data. No questions in the test were identified where New Zealand children might be disadvantaged in comparison with US children. It appears that the PLAI-2 is appropriate for use with New Zealand children at this age, to identify therapy goals and to measure progress. However, the scaled scores for Level IV, the Receptive language scores, and the Discourse Ability Scores should all be interpreted with caution concerning severity since these scores are likely to be elevated for New Zealand children.