LIU for Evaluating Language

For parents who are intending to bring their children for language evaluation, they may in the future be able to use this new evaluation tool to help them to have a more accurate measurement. LIU is a new set of measures for evaluating spoken language development in children with ASD which is developed at the University of Waterloo after more than 8 years of research. The development of the inventory involved more than 3500 parents across Canada who completed the questionaire describing their child’s language ability.

Language Use Inventory (LIU) is a new standardized parent questionaire that more accurately guage the level of language skills in children with autism. The tool looks at the pragmatic language development and aks parents about their child’s use of language in many different kinds of settings. The different kinds of interactions with other people that are asked could be on ability to telling stories, comment on things, teasing, asking for help or providing information that others might need. Many areas of such pragmatics of language can be an area of great difficulty for children with autism.

The tool collected a large scales inventory of parental inputs and provide norms for children aged from 18 months to 47 months. The LUI allows a comparison of a child’s score with the children of the same age against the norms collected. It is a similar concept what is being used to gauge your child development with the weight and heights charts used by your family doctors.

Although the inventory collected is huge but it will need to be localised and further tailored to the local situations before a more accurate comparison could be used. Unless you are fine to compare your child to the Canada or US norms, the results may not be accurate pertaining to the country you live in. Nevertheless, LIU provide another possibility of learning more about how your child’s language progress compared with his peers of the same age and compliment to other methods of evaluation.