Tarsp

In this article a preliminary report is given of a research project concerning a Dutch version of Crystal, Fletcher & Garman's LARSP, Language Assessment Remediation and Screening Procedure, a gram-matical developmental scale for the use of language therapy. The first Part of the project consisted of a longitudinal study of 15 children between 1;3 and 3;6 with six monthly spontaneous language samples per child. The result of this study showed that the most striking and stable characteristic of grammatical development till the age of four was the increasing number of constituents in the sentence (with the Declarative sentence having one more constituent than the Command and the Question in all stages, compare Wells, 1985). Based on this a cross-sectional study was carried out with the number of constituents of the Declarative or the same number minus one in and Q as a language measure. After assigning the 100 children involved to the seven stages of the Dutch TARSP, the lower language level part of the scale was constructed: Wordgroups, Connectives, Pronouns and Word Structure. The Dutch version of TARSP is compared to a smal-ler Dutch study based on LARSP with a different methodological set-up: GRAMAT.