Detecting Developmental Language Disorder in Monolingual and Bilingual Children: Comparison of Language-Specific and Crosslinguistic Nonword Repetition Tasks in French and Portuguese.

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Title:	Detecting Developmental Language Disorder in Monolingual and Bilingual Children: Comparison of Language-Specific and Crosslinguistic Nonword Repetition Tasks in French and Portuguese.
Authors:	Schwob, Salomé¹ salome.schwob@unine.ch, Skoruppa, Katrin¹
Source:	Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research. Mar2022, Vol. 65 Issue 3, p1159-1165. 7p. 1 Chart, 1 Graph.
Subject Terms:	Repetition (Learning process), Speech evaluation, Short-term memory, Children, Monolingualism, Bilingualism in children, Task performance, Language disorder diagnosis, Statistics, Analysis of variance, Multivariate analysis, Fisher exact test, Multilingualism in children, Phonetics, Descriptive statistics, Repeated measures design, Sensitivity & specificity (Statistics), Data analysis software, Receiver operating characteristic curves
Geographic Terms:	Switzerland
Abstract:	Purpose: Over the last decades, many studies have documented the clinical potential of nonword repetition (NWR) tasks for detecting developmental language disorder in mono- (MON) and bilingual (BIL) children by unveiling their difficulties in short-term memory and phonological accuracy. However, the precise nature of the nonwords to be used and the best scoring methods remain under debate. Some authors (e.g., Gutiérrez-Clellen & Simon-Cereijido, 2010) support the use of “language-specific” nonwords designed for a given test language in standardized tests. Other authors (e.g., Chiat, 2015) advocate the use of “crosslinguistic” stimuli, thus allowing assessment independently of the languages spoken by the child. Method: This research note compares two language-specific tasks (French vs. Portuguese) and a crosslinguistic NWR task in a population of 5- to 7-year-old MON and BIL children. Group comparisons (children with vs. without developmental language disorder; MON vs. BIL children), an error analysis, sensitivity and specificity calculations (assessed according to the recommendations of Plante and Vance, 1994, and Youden, 1950) are reported. Results: All three tasks significantly differentiate children with and without developmental language disorder with large effect sizes but did not show an effect for bilingualism, which is encouraging for the BIL assessment. As expected, an influence of children’s age and length and complexity of the stimuli was also found. The language-specific French task was found to be the most sensitive (max. 88%) and specific (max. 92%); the crosslinguistic task also reached good accuracy percentages for the BIL group (max. 82% sensitivity and 84% specificity). Conclusion: This research note adds to the evidence that NWR tasks are promising tolls for the identification of MON and BIL children with developmental language disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
	Copyright of Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research is the property of American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
Database:	Education Research Complete

Description
Abstract:	Purpose: Over the last decades, many studies have documented the clinical potential of nonword repetition (NWR) tasks for detecting developmental language disorder in mono- (MON) and bilingual (BIL) children by unveiling their difficulties in short-term memory and phonological accuracy. However, the precise nature of the nonwords to be used and the best scoring methods remain under debate. Some authors (e.g., Gutiérrez-Clellen & Simon-Cereijido, 2010) support the use of “language-specific” nonwords designed for a given test language in standardized tests. Other authors (e.g., Chiat, 2015) advocate the use of “crosslinguistic” stimuli, thus allowing assessment independently of the languages spoken by the child. Method: This research note compares two language-specific tasks (French vs. Portuguese) and a crosslinguistic NWR task in a population of 5- to 7-year-old MON and BIL children. Group comparisons (children with vs. without developmental language disorder; MON vs. BIL children), an error analysis, sensitivity and specificity calculations (assessed according to the recommendations of Plante and Vance, 1994, and Youden, 1950) are reported. Results: All three tasks significantly differentiate children with and without developmental language disorder with large effect sizes but did not show an effect for bilingualism, which is encouraging for the BIL assessment. As expected, an influence of children’s age and length and complexity of the stimuli was also found. The language-specific French task was found to be the most sensitive (max. 88%) and specific (max. 92%); the crosslinguistic task also reached good accuracy percentages for the BIL group (max. 82% sensitivity and 84% specificity). Conclusion: This research note adds to the evidence that NWR tasks are promising tolls for the identification of MON and BIL children with developmental language disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
ISSN:	10924388
DOI:	10.1044/2021_JSLHR-21-00017