Expressive Language
Producing spoken language to communicate thoughts, needs, and ideas with appropriate grammar and sentence structure.
Examples & Achievements
- Speaks in sentences of 5-8+ words
- Uses past tense ("we went to the park") and future tense ("I will eat later")
- Tells a simple story with a beginning, middle, and end
- Explains how something works or why something happened
- Uses conjunctions (and, but, because, so)
How to Measure
- Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) of 5+ morphemes (language sample)
- Produces grammatically correct sentences 80%+ of the time
- Tells a coherent 3+ event narrative from a picture sequence
- EVT-3 (Expressive Vocabulary Test) standard score
- CELF Preschool-3 Expressive Language Index
Sources (3)
- CDC/AAP
- ASQ-3
- SLP Standards