ABSTRACT
The publication of Assessing Language Production in Children affectionately known as the Blue Book, marked the culmination of 10 years of work developing language assessment techniques that would yield descriptive and quantitative data documenting the developing language of hard-to-test children. Language features such as speaking rate, verbal fluency, and discourse were analyzed by calculating words per minute, mazes percent responses to questions, and turn length. All measures of vocabulary are based on sampling. This is true whether estimating total vocabulary, new words learned each day or year, parts of speech, or frequency of occurrence. The script vocabulary list contained 87 different word roots. The number of script vocabulary used by the subjects in retelling the story was relatively small, even though they were using an increasing number of different words and their narrative structure scores were increasing with advancing grade. Peer Vocabulary was generated by creating a master list of all the different words used by all the children at each grade.
