Expressive Language

Expressive Language is what we do when we share our ideas through speaking.

Children with good expressive language skills:

• Are able to retrieve words with ease
• Use a variety of vocabulary
• Use simple and complex sentences
• Use age appropriate grammatical forms (e.g., past tense -ed)
• Tell stories sequentially with detail and ease

Characteristics of an expressive language disorder include overuse of filler words like “uh,” “thing” or “stuff", overuse of gesturing, difficulty “coming to the point," poor sentence structure, word-finding difficulties, and limited vocabulary.

How the Well Screening can help

Subtest 4: Confrontational Naming measures the ability to retrieve information with accuracy and speed. The child is shown six common objects (i.e., bike, fish, house, moon, tree, car). The child is asked to rapidly name 32 objects (four rows of eight objects) that are randomly arranged on the page.

Subtest 7: Language Formulation measures the ability to apply word structure rules (morphology). The child is shown a picture and asked to complete orally presented sentences using a cloze format (i.e., “fill in the blank”) to mark inflections, derivations, and comparisons; and to use appropriate pronouns to refer to people. Example: Here the boy eats. Here the boy ________.