Grammatical competence is a part of the wider linguistic competence and consists of knowledge and the right use of morphological and syntactical rules when producing individual words, phrases, clauses and sentences. Children are gradually gaining grammatical competence in the first years of their life and through it the knowledge for a successful communication. Few authors write about the development of grammatical competence of Slovene-speaking children (developmental and age milestones). Additionally, the lack of the standardized tests results in the assessment of development of grammatical competence, which is based only on the judgment of experts.
Theoretical part presents a review of the knowledge about the development of grammatical competence and the possible ways of assessing this area.
Empirical part presents SLO-LARSP (Slovenian Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure) – an instrument which analyses child's utterances on sentence, clause, phrase and word level, gained by recording and transcribing child-expert interaction. SLO-LARSP is a Slovenian version of LARSP profile, which was made in 70’s by the author David Crystal in order to assess children's language and plan the therapy. SLO-LARSP profile is still in the phase of adaptation for the Slovene language and the empirical part presents the first use of the profile with ten three-year-old children. This test showed that SLO-LARSP profile is highly informative and economical from material point of view; nevertheless, it demands a lot of time for the entire profiling procedure and quite a linguistic knowledge. The test also showed that some parts of the profile need additional adaptation – the final part of this thesis proposes the new version of SLO-LARSP profile that contains several alternations.
This master thesis is a novelty in the Slovenian speech and language therapy field, since it offers an instrument for the assessment of the development of grammatical competence, which will enrich the therapist's collection of devices for quality speech, language and communication diagnostics.
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