The Language Use Inventory (LUI) is a new, standardized parent questionnaire to assess early language use and pragmatics in children 18 to 47 months of age and developed by Dr. Daniela O'Neill. The LUI is the product of over 10 years of research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Below, researchers/clinicians/health professionals and parents will find more information about the LUI. Researchers interesting in adapting and translating the LUI into another language for use in research will also find relevant information below

The published, normed version of the LUI, with automated scoring is now available for Speech, Language & Health Professsionals & Researchers to order at the website of its publisher, Knowledge in Development, Inc.

LUI recommended for pragmatics assessment
by a panel of autism experts!

The LUI is included among a set of recommended measures for assessment of pragmatics in evaluating the efficacy of interventions that target spoken language acquisition in children with autism spectrum disorders by a panel of experts convened by NIH's National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (Tager-Flusberg et al., 2009). Here is also a press release on the LUI's inclusion in the report.

Dec. 2011: The LUI has been added to ASHA's Directory of Speech Language Pathology Assessment Instruments & Best Start's OnTrack Guide for Screening Tools in Ontario

Dec. 2011: The LUI is now in use in 8 Canadian Provinces, 30 states in the USA, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand!
It is also being translated into 6 languages!

Here are some media write-ups of this research!

Parents can help researchers evaluate language skills in autistic children
in The Record, July 18, 2009

When words come slowly in The Record, Dec. 5 2003
Child language research in the spotlight in The UW Gazette, 2003

For researchers, clinicians and health professionals:

Brief overview: The LUI meets urgent calls for a standardized, empirically validated measure of children's early language use (i.e,, pragmatic language development) suitable for very young children - 18 to 47 months of age. The LUI has undergone years of development to ensure its internal reliability, discriminative and concurrent validity. For example, in a study of its ability to distinguish between young children with and without language delay, its sensitivity and specificity was found to be 96%. Detailed information about the LUI and its development is available in O'Neill (2007, Journal of Speech,Language and Hearing Research).

Norms have been developed as a result of a cross-Canada standardization study (The Canadian Early Childhood Language Project) involving over 3500 Canadian children from over 550 communities and all provinces and territories. These norms allow a child's score to be quickly converted to a percentile-score relative to peers of the same age in months. These norms can be found in the now newly-published and available LUI Manual (O'Neill, 2009) that accompanies the published LUI forms and LUI Score Sheets (visit knowledgeindevelopment.ca for more information and to order the LUI). A study of its predictive validity with respect to children's performance on pragmatic language measures at the time of school entry involving 350 participants from the standardization study has just been accepted in August 2011 for publication in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.

The Language Use Inventory (LUI) also has a facebook page for users.

Development of the LUI has been, and is currently being funded, by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. We have just received further funding to begin development of a French-Canadian version of the LUI and conduct a longitudinal study to examine individual differences in pragmatic language development in more detail.

Interested in using the LUI in your clinic or in a research project? Researchers and clinicians should find all the information they need at knowledgeindevelopment.ca. Further questions can be directed to Daniela O'Neill directly at doneill@uwaterloo.ca. The LUI is currently being used in a number of research projects. Below you will find a listing of some of them.

STUDIES INVOLVING CHILDREN WITH AUTISM
Study	Learning in 3- to 5-year-olds with autism
Researchers	Rebecca Landa, Adele Diamond
Institution	Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, USA
Funded by	NIH: National Institute of Mental Health
Study	Infants at-risk for autism and infants at low risk for developmental delay
Researchers	Rebecca Landa
Institution	Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, USA
Funded by	NIH: National Institute of Mental Health
Study	Early Steps Study: (Intensive Treatment for Toddlers with Autism: A Multi-site Randomized Study) is a randomized trial of an early intensive behavioral intervention (Early Start Denver Model; ESDM) compared to standard community treatment (assessment and monitoring).
Researchers	Annette Estes, Sally Rogers, Catherine Lord
Institutions	University of Washington, Seattle; UC Davis MIND; University of Michigan (USA)
Funded by	NIH Autism Center of Excellence
Study	Infants at Risk of Autism: A Longitudinal Study
Researchers	Sally Ozonoff, Sally Rogers, Marian Sigman
Institutions	UC Davis, MIND; UC Davis MIND; UCLA (USA)
Funded by	National Institute of Mental Health R01-MH068398
Study	Auditory Mechanisms of Social Engagment
Researchers	PI: Rhea Paul Co-Investigator: Katyrzyna Chawarska
Institutions	Yale University
Funded By	NIMH under Yale's Autism Center of Excellence, PI: Ami Klin
Study	Autism: Longitudinal perspectives, Biological origins, Environmental Risk, Translational Approaches (the ALBERTA project)
Researchers:	Glen Baker, Lonnie Zwaigenbaum, Margaret Clarke, Kathryn Todd, Joanne Volden, Carmen Rasmussen, Bryan Kolb, Chris Power, Jerry Yager, Jaideep Bains, Igor Burstyn, Eric Fombonne, Suzanne Curtin, Steven Scherer, Sergio Pellis, Robbin Gibb, David Nicholas.
Institution	University of Alberta, Canada
Funded by	Seeking funding. (Alberta Heritage Fund for Medical Research)
STUDIES WITH HIGH-RISK INFANTS
Study	Early detection of language disorders in genetically and perinatally high-risk infants.
Researchers	Janet Werker, Barbara May Bernhardt, Linda Siegal, Julie Scott, Nenagh Kemp
Institution	University of British Columbia, Canada
Funded by	Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada -CHRP (Collaborative Health Research Projects Program) and BC Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP)
STUDIES WITH PREMATURELY BORN CHILDREN
Study	Linguistic development of premature infants
Researchers	Amy Booth, Jessica Meye
Institutions	Northwestern University, IL, USA
Funded by	Seeking funding

 

Interested in adapting the LUI into another language?

Guidelines for the adaptation of the LUI into other languages and the necessary License agreement required from the publisher (Knoweldge in Development, Inc.) are available on the publishers' website at http://knowledgeindevelopment.ca/about/translations.html
Interested researchers can also email Daniela O'Neill directly. Below is a listing of some ongoing projects in which a research version of the LUI is being developed for use in another language.

ONGOING RESEARCH STUDIES INVOLVING THE TRANSLATION/ADAPTATION OF THE LUI INTO OTHER LANGUAGES
LANGUAGE	ARABIC
Primary Researcher(s)	Aseel Alkadhi Ph.D Doctoral Student City University London Advisors: Dr. Shula Chiat & Dr. Penny Roy P.O. Box 18219 Riyadh 11415 Saudi Arabia email: aalkadhia (at) yahoo.com
Institution	City University London, UK
Project Title	An investigation of relations between sociocognitive skills, motor imitation and language skills in young Saudi children.
LANGUAGE	ITALIAN
Primary Researcher(s)	Dr. Emiddia Longobardi Universita degli Studi di Roma 'Sapienza' Dip. di Psicologia Dinamica e Clinica Via degli Apuli 1 00185 Roma Italy email: emiddia.longobardi (at) uniroma1.it
Institution	Universita degli Studi di Roma 'Sapienza'
Project Title	An examination of pragmatic abilities through the Language Use Inventory
LANGUAGE	POLISH
Primary Researcher(s)	Dr. Marta Bialecka-Pikul Institute of Psychology Jagiellonian University Al. Mickiewicza 3 31-120 Krakow Poland email: marta.bialecka-pikul (at) uj.edu.pl
Institution	Jagiellonian University, Poland
Project Title	The birth and development of mentalizing ability
LANGUAGE	POLISH
Primary Researcher(s)	Dr. Ewa Haman Psycholinguistics Lab Faculty of Psychology University of Warsaw Stawki 5/7 00-183 Warsaw Poland email: ewa.haman (at) psych.uw.edu.pl
Institution	University of Warsaw
Project Title	Cognitive and linguistic development of Polish bilingual children - risks and opportunities at school entrance age
LANGUAGE	PORTUGUESE
Primary Researcher(s)	Dr. Anabela Santos Insitute of Education University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar 4715- Braga Portugal email: anabelacruz (at) gmail.com Cristiana Guimaraes Ph.D. Doctoral Student; Advisor Dr. Anabela Santos University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar
Institution	University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar
Project Title	Development of a Portuguese Language Use Inventory
LANGUAGE	SLOVENIAN
Primary Researcher(s)	Dr. Martina Ozbic Assistant Professor Faculty of education – University of Ljubljana Department of Special Education Kardeljeva ploscad 16 1000 Ljubljana Slovenija email: Martina.Ozbic (at) pef.uni-lj.si Co-researchers: Dr. Damjana Kogovsek & Jenerja Novsak Brce Faculty of education – University of Ljubljana Department of Special Education
Institution	University of Ljubljana. Slovenia
Project Title	Pragmatic language development in Slovenian children from 18-47 months of age: A pilot study

For Parents:

First, a huge thank you to the thousands of parents across Canada who took part in the Canadian Early Childhood Language Project over the past few years! With your help, we were able to accomplish the goal of having completed questionnaires for over 3500 children - that is, more than our goal even of having questionnaires completed for 100 children at each month from 18 to 47 months. This data has allowed us to learn what the typical range of scores on the LUI is for children at each age in months from 18 - 47. This means that, in the future, a family doctor, health professional or speech-language professional may be able to inform parents (once the LUI is completed by a parent and the score is interpreted by a professional using the norms) much more quickly as to how their child is performing relative to children of the same sex and age in months, based on rigourous, empirical data. For example, a parent may learn more quickly that their concerns were justified and their child is scoring at a low percentile for his/her age, allowing intervention to begin sooner. In other cases, a parent may learn, to their relief, that their child's performance is actually on par with the performance of their child's peers. In other words, just as, in the first months and years of your child's life, your doctor told you the your child's percentile score for height and weight, similarly the LUI will provide this infomation with respect to a child's use of language. It is hoped that the LUI will help to shorten the waiting time for parents to receive an initial assessment of their child's language functioning, and also do so in a timely and cost-effective manner for both parent and child.

Parents' comments about completing the LUI and taking part in the research to develop it:

The following are comments we received from some of the parents who took part in the Canadian Early Childhood Language Project and completed the Language Use Inventory Questionnaire.

"I have learned a lot about my child from doing this questionnaire."

"Very informative!"

"I thoroughly enjoyed filling out your questionnaire. It was straightforward, user-friendly, and the bracketed examples were very helpful in understanding context. It was a treat to realize how much language my son has. My husband and I got lots of chuckles from your very kid-focused examples. Good luck with the remainder of your study. I look forward to browsing the updates on your website. It was an honor to take part. Thank you."

"I'm glad that you touched on teasing and humour because my son is a funny little boy. Thank you for this questionnaire, I have learned a lot from it."

"Thank you for looking into studies that will help our children in the future"

"I thank you for your work and hope you have an overwhelming response from participates in order to make this work."

"It was interesting filling out your survey. It made me really think about my child's likes and dislikes and what she spends her time doing and talking about. Thanks for the experience."

"I enjoyed completing your questionnaire. I look forward to learning more about the results and the implications for our children."

"I would like to support this study because I had to go through the long waiting list for a speech therapist to have my son's speech assessed (which turned out to be fine). Having a questionnaire to be used by doctors etc. to assess speech would be much more convenient."

"This is a great project."

"[I] was a kindergarten teacher for many years...Parents are often told not to worry about speech and/or language problems when they inquire with the family doctor or other professionals, about their concerns. I think your assessment will be a great benefit to parents and their children and I look forward to seeing it in use in the near future. If all parents completed it and had it reviewed in a timely fashion by a speech/langauge pathologist then the chidlren who really need services could be seen long before they enter school and parents could be involved in supporting this intervention, given the right direction."

Below are some photographs of the students who helped in the Canadian Early Childhood Language Project.

The 2005 Early Childhood Language Project Team in the main office

- Pandora, Alyse, Jane and Jennifer.

 

Research assistants on the 2004-2005 Early Childhood Language Project Team in the research office. From left to right, Elizabeth Brunger, Jeannette Benson and Christina Chen.

 

The mounties visit our booth at the 2004 Canada Day celebrations at the University of Waterloo! Research assistant, Valerie Athaide, is at right.

 

This page was last updated on December 30, 2011

 

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