Purpose As is the case with children who rely on spoken language, speech-language pathologists must support and track the expressive language development of children with complex communication needs who use graphic symbols to communicate. This research note presents a framework of the progression of expressive English sentence development using graphic symbols and introduces possible approaches for measuring and analyzing graphic symbol use. Method Current issues in measuring graphic symbol utterances are explored, and a range of measures designed to analyze individual graphic symbol utterances as well as larger samples of utterances are presented. Results Both the Graphic Symbol Utterance and Sentence Development Framework and suggested measures are based on years of graphic symbol intervention research, including two large ongoing research studies of preschoolers with severe speech impairments. Our framework adapts the work of Hadley (2014) to depict expressive language progression from early symbol combinations to childlike and adultlike sentences and highlights developmental patterns unique to graphic symbol productions. Adaptations of existing measures (such as mean length of utterance) as well as measures unique to graphic symbol analyses are presented and discussed. Conclusion To accurately track changes in early graphic symbol utterance growth and complexity, a multidimensional approach, which includes analyses such as symbol relevance, word class diversity, and lexical diversity, is recommended.

中文翻译：

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跟踪图形符号交流中的早期造句进展。


目的 与依赖口语的儿童一样，语言病理学家必须支持和跟踪具有复杂交流需求、使用图形符号进行交流的儿童的表达性语言发展。本研究报告提出了使用图形符号表达英语句子发展的框架，并介绍了测量和分析图形符号使用的可能方法。方法探讨了当前测量图形符号话语的问题，并提出了一系列旨在分析单个图形符号话语以及更大的话语样本的措施。结果图形符号话语和句子发展框架以及建议的措施均基于多年的图形符号干预研究，包括正在进行的两项针对患有严重言语障碍的学龄前儿童的大型研究。我们的框架采用 Hadley（2014）的作品来描述从早期符号组合到儿童般和成人般的句子的表达性语言进展，并强调图形符号产生所特有的发展模式。提出并讨论了现有措施（例如话语的平均长度）的改编以及图形符号分析特有的措施。结论 为了准确跟踪早期图形符号话语增长和复杂性的变化，建议采用多维方法，包括符号相关性、词类多样性和词汇多样性等分析。