title: Sampling reliability in elicited imitation.
abstract: This study examined the number of trials necessary to obtain sampling reliability in elicited imitation. An examiner-constructed elicited imitation test was administered to 15 language-disordered subjects, sampled from the age range of 5:6 to 6:6 years. All test sentences were controlled for length, syntactic construction, and semantic content. The test instrument contained multiple occurrences of 16 syntactic structures. For each of these forms, subject performance on 1, 3, 5, and 7 trials was compared with performance on 10 trials. It was observed that sampling reliability increased as the number of trials increased, but as few as three repetitions provided reliable data.
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D007807:Language Tests / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards*; D008037:Linguistics