Speech and language screening of preschool children in American Samoa

A speech and language inventory was developed in the Samoan language (Wallace & Tilo, 1990) and administered to 20 American Samoan preschool children to determine if it discriminated between children rated by their teacher as "normally developing" and those rated as "impaired" on its four subtests; articulation, vocabulary, auditory comprehension, and sentence repetition. A Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was used to determine the relationship between teacher rating and obtained score on the four subtests of the inventory. Results revealed very weak positive correlations between the two variables of teacher rating and obtained score. The data seem to indicate that the inventory does not adequately discriminate between American Samoan preschool children rated as "normally developing" and as "impaired" by their teachers.