Developmental assessment of Spanish grammar.

The Developmental Assessment of Spanish Grammar (DASG) provides a language analysis procedure for Spanish-speaking children similar to the Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) procedure in English. The DASG is not an attempted translation of the DSS but was developed independently, taking into consideration the present knowledge of Spanish language acquisition. The purpose of the DASG is to evaluate the language of children with deficient grammatical skills in Spanish and to serve as a model for structuring Spanish language therapy. Proposed syntactic hierarchies for the following six grammatical categories are presented: indefinite pronouns and noun modifiers, personal pronouns, primary verbs, secondary verbs, conjunctions, and interrogative words. Weighted scores are assigned to groups of structures within the hierarchies and are used to score Spanish sentences children use spontaneously in conversation with an adult. The DASG was standardized on 128 Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 3.0 and 6.11 years. Norms and reliability measures are presented.