HARSP: A Developmental Language Profi le for Hebrew

This section outlines the history of the study from which the present chapter is derived and describes its database, and it also provides a brief introduction to relevant features of the structure of Israeli Hebrew. The original study was conducted over a period of several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the first author in cooperation with Anita Rom, a senior lecturer and researcher on speech pathology and atypical language development, and Myrna Hirsch, a speech clinician then living on Kibbutz Yizrael where she collected much of the data on which the study is based. This is a revised and updated version of an unpublished booklet produced by Berman et al., entitled Working with HARSP: Hebrew Adaptation of the LARSP Language Assessment Remediation and Screening Procedure (February 1982) and presented to the Israel Association of Speech Clinicians during a visit to Israel in 1981 by Michael Garman from the University of Reading. Since that time, the language of Hebrew-acquiring children with both normal and atypical development has been the topic of extensive research, part of which is referenced below. However, while the analyses presented below are considerably modified from the 1982 version of HARSP, our presentation adheres to the format stipulated in Crystal et al. (1989), combined with the 2005 updated manual, in order to be consistent with the overall goals of this volume.