Testing for a specific syntactic structure.

Nine language delayed children who had failed the "is interrogative" test item on the Programmed Conditioning for Language Test served as subjects. A comparison was made of subjects' syntactic performance on six language tasks designed by the investigators to elicit the "is interrogative" structure. These tasks ranged along an imitative-to-spontaneous continuum demonstrating varying degrees of communicative intention, presence or absence of contextual referents, and varying levels of task structure. Analyses indicated all nine subjects produced complete grammatical "is interrogative" utterances on one or more of the language tasks. The most effective tasks for eliciting the specific structure were those that required communicative intention, included specific contextual referents, and provided a relatively structured situation. The direct imitative task was less effective, although it elicited more correct productions than the spontaneous language sampling task. However, the relative eliciting potential of each task was not the same for each child. Theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.