SUGAR (Sampling Utterances and Grammatical Analysis Revised): Breaking Tradition

Purpose: In this letter, the authors respond to Guo, Eisenberg, Ratner, and MacWhinney's (2018) letter to the editor, which expressed concerns regarding the clinical applicability of the Sampling Utterances and Grammatical Analysis Revised (SUGAR; Pavelko & Owens, 2017) language sample analysis (LSA) method. Method: The authors respond to concerns regarding transcription and morpheme segmentation and language sample elicitation contexts. The results of two published research studies are described, which detail the impact of this new LSA method. Results: Published research studies have documented that the SUGAR method of LSA can accurately distinguish between children developing language typically and children with language impairment and can also aid clinicians in developing intervention goals. Conclusion: SUGAR is a clinically applicable method of LSA that clinicians can use as one part of a comprehensive evaluation to efficiently and accurately identify children with language impairment. Further, clinicians can complete subanalysis of a language sample to identify appropriate therapy targets.