Table 1.

General definitions of the five types of errors that are recorded during administration of the MLSE

	Definition	Notes	Subtests in which errors can be made (max errors in each)
Motor speech error	A response that is slurred, stuttered or contorted and which the examiner would find difficult to repeat or transcribe	Motor speech errors arise only during tasks requiring speech production.A motor speech error should be noted and scored, even when self-corrected. The errors are not confined to speech dyspraxia	Naming (6)Syllable repetition (3)Repeat and point (3)Non-word repetition (3)Reading (10)Sentence repetition (4)Picture description (1)
Phonological error	A response that contains incorrect but word-like components and which could easily be repeated or written down	Phonological errors arise only during tasks requiring speech production.Any phonological error should be noted and scored, even when self-corrected	Naming (6)Syllable repetition (3)Repeat and point (3)Non-word repetition (3)Reading (10)Sentence repetition (4)Picture description (1)
Semantic error	A semantic error is noted when a participant’s response suggests a deficit at the level of conceptual knowledge and/or word meaning	Semantic errors can arise during both production (e.g. naming) and comprehension (e.g. picture association) tasks. Context-specific guidance is provided for each subtask	Naming (6)Repeat and point (3)Semantic association (4)Reading (5)Picture description (2)
Syntactic error	A syntactic error occurs when a participant demonstrates difficulty understanding or producing grammatically correct sentences	Context-specific guidance is provided for each subtask	Sentence comprehension (8)Writing (1)Picture description (1)
Working memory error	Working memory errors are recorded when a participant is unable to repeat sentences correctly. The shorter the incorrectly repeated sentence, the higher the error score	Working memory errors are scored only during the sentence repetition task	Sentence repetition (10)