These games are built by a speech-language pathologist, and where an
activity was shaped by published research, this page says which research and what it
changed. Every reference below is listed in full so you can go and read it.
What this page is, and is not
It records the literature that informed how an activity was designed. It is
not a claim that any activity here has itself been tested in a trial, and
nothing on this site is norm-referenced or diagnostic. Where an activity gives you
numbers — the Grammar Probe, the Speech Sound Screener — they are descriptive, for
goal setting and for watching change over time.
By activity
Language · Elementary–middle school
Word Machine
Morphological awareness — prefixes, suffixes and Greek and Latin roots. Three
things in the literature changed the build directly: the levels run
inflectional before derivational, to follow the order these skills usually
develop; there is a word sort level, because sorting is one of the two core
activity types described; and a child who builds a logical non-word is told
what it would mean rather than simply marked wrong, because that exploration is
treated as part of the learning, not an error.
The rationale on its front page — that morphological awareness supports vocabulary
growth and reading comprehension, and that more than half of English words are
morphologically complex — comes from the sources below. The later levels use Greek
and Latin roots as clues to meaning, which is CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.5.4.B.
Wolter & Gibson (2015)Anglin, Miller & Wakefield (1993)Carlisle (2010)Nagy, Berninger & Abbott (2006)
Language · Clinical tool
Grammar Probe
An informal, clinician-scored elicitation probe, plus a clause count on a short
language sample. It exists in this form because the literature is blunt about a
practical problem: a conversational language sample is the better assessment, and
the reason school-based clinicians do not run one is time. So this is built
to be quick and repeatable, and it says on its own front page that it does not
replace a sample.
The structures lead with tense and agreement, the most studied clinical
marker in this literature, and close with complex syntax, which school-age
assessment often leaves out. Part 2 reports clauses per sentence and names
which clause types did and did not appear, because identifying the specific clause
types to target is a gap the recent work calls out. Elicited and spontaneous
contexts do not always agree, so the two halves are reported separately.
Anglin, J. M., Miller, G. A., & Wakefield, P. C. (1993). Vocabulary development: A morphological analysis. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 58(10), i–186.
Barako Arndt, K., & Schuele, C. M. (2013). Multiclausal utterances aren’t just for big kids: A framework for analysis of complex syntax production in spoken language of preschool- and early school-age children. Topics in Language Disorders, 33(2), 125–139.
Carlisle, J. F. (2010). Effects of instruction in morphological awareness on literacy achievement: An integrative review. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(4), 464–487.
Castilla-Earls, A., Auza, A., Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Fulcher-Rood, K., & Barr, C. (2020). Morphological errors in monolingual Spanish-speaking children with and without developmental language disorders. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 51(2), 270–281.
Finestack, L. H., Rohwer, B., Hilliard, L., & Abbeduto, L. (2020). Using Computerized Language Analysis to evaluate grammatical skills. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 51(2), 184–204.
Fulcher-Rood, K., Castilla-Earls, A. P., & Higginbotham, J. (2018). School-based speech-language pathologists’ perspectives on diagnostic decision making. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27(2), 796–812.
Leonard, L. B., Camarata, S. M., Brown, B., & Camarata, M. N. (2004). Tense and agreement in the speech of children with specific language impairment: Patterns of generalization through intervention. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47(6), 1363–1379.
Nagy, W. E., Berninger, V. W., & Abbott, R. D. (2006). Contributions of morphology beyond phonology to literacy outcomes of upper elementary and middle-school students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(1), 134–147.
Pavelko, S. L., Owens, R. E., Ireland, M., & Hahs-Vaughn, D. L. (2016). Use of language sample analysis by school-based SLPs: Results of a nationwide survey. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 47(3), 246–258.
Pavelko, S. L., Owens, R. E., Jr., & Hahs-Vaughn, D. L. (2025). Changes in the production of complex syntax by elementary-aged school children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 56(4), 1002–1010. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_LSHSS-24-00141
Rice, M. L., Wexler, K., & Hershberger, S. (1998). Tense over time: The longitudinal course of tense acquisition in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 41(6), 1412–1431.
Wolter, J. A., & Gibson, F. E. (2015). Morphological awareness assessment and intervention to improve language and literacy. Seminars in Speech and Language, 36, 31–41.
Four citations still need a full reference. These were used from a summary
rather than the source article, so the complete entry is not yet recorded here:
Tomblin et al. (1997) and Watkins, Kelly, Harbers & Hollis (1995)
on Word Machine, and Owens & Pavelko (2020) and
Pavelko & Owens (2017) on the Grammar Probe. They are named here rather
than quietly dropped, and will be listed in full once verified.