A test for measuring syntactic development in young children

This article concerns linguistic, psychometric and clinical aspects of the Test for Sentence Development, a subtest of a new Dutch language production battery, the Schlichting Test voor Taalproductie (Schlichting Test for Language Production). The purpose of the Test for Sentence Development is to assess the syntactic knowledge in the language production of young Dutch children. The Test for Sentence Development aims to give an index of the level of grammatical skills of children from 1;8 to 6;3 and makes use of functional imitation as an elicitation technique. The advantage of the new test is that very young children can be assessed systematically, which was not possible previously. In the standardization study, the tests were administered to a representative sample of 1049 Dutch children. The reliability and validity results justify the use of the test in clinical settings and language research.