Preliminary Study for the Development of a Dyslexia Screening Test for Early Elementary Students in Korea: Reliability and Validity

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been used to measure children’s expressive language skills in normal and abnormal language development, and to examine the development of the speaking skills in second language acquisition, as well as to survey the proficiency of bilingual language development. Recently, SR tasks have been recognized as a potential psycholinguistic tool to identify bilingual children with language impairment. SR tasks are easy and quick to conduct, and a useful technique for obtaining quantitative and qualitative information about children’s lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge, as well as language development in a complex linguistic background. This paper reports the results of a pilot study conducted to investigate the performance of SR among bilingual Mandarin-English preschoolers, from age four to six. The task was conducted in both languages: Mandarin, and English, to examine the type of grammatical errors found among different age groups in the SR task. Studying the performance of SR in both languages could provide a better understanding of children’s language learning and their acquisition pattern in both the first and second language. Overall task accuracy in each language was compared; grammatical errors in the SR task were described qualitatively. The results showed that the linguistic characteristic of the stimulus materials in Mandarin and English influences the performance of these bilingual children in the SR task. The study also showed that the grammatical errors found in the SR tasks may have the potential of being used to distinguish children with typical and atypical language development in the first language (L1).

The detection of specific language impairment (SLI) in children growing up bilingually presents particular challenges for clinicians. Non-word repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR) tasks have proven to be the most accurate diagnostic tools for monolingual populations, raising the question of the extent of their usefulness in different bilingual populations. To determine the diagnostic accuracy of NWR and SR tasks that incorporate phonological/syntactic complexity as discussed in recent linguistic theory. The tasks were developed as part of the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) toolkit, in two different national settings, France and Germany, and investigated children with three different home languages: Arabic, Portuguese and Turkish. NWR and SR tasks developed in parallel were administered to 151 bilingual children, aged 5;6-8;11, in France and in Germany, to 64 children in speech-language therapy (SLT) and to 87 children not in SLT, whose first language (L1) was Arabic, Portuguese or Turkish. Children were also administered standardized language tests in each of their languages to determine likely clinical status (typical development (TD) or SLI), and parents responded to a questionnaire including questions about early and current language use (bilingualism factors) and early language development (risk factors for SLI). Monolingual controls included 47 TD children and 29 children with SLI. Results were subjected to inter-group comparisons, to diagnostic accuracy calculation, and to correlation and multiple regression analyses. In accordance with previous studies, NWR and SR identified SLI in the monolingual children, yielding good to excellent diagnostic accuracy. Diagnostic accuracy in bilingual children was fair to good, generally distinguishing children likely to have SLI from children likely to have TD. Accuracy was necessarily linked to the determination of clinical status, which was based on standardized assessment in each of the child's languages. Positive early development, a composite risk factor for SLI, and not variables related to language exposure and use, generally emerged as the strongest predictor of performance on the two tasks, constituting additional, independent support for the efficacy of NWR and SR in identifying impairment in bilingual children. NWR and SR tasks informed by linguistic theory are appropriate for use as part of the diagnostic process for identifying language impairment in bilingual children for whom the language of assessment is different from the home language, in diverse sociolinguistic contexts.

This systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis examines the accuracy of sentence repetition (SR) tasks in distinguishing between typically developing (TD) children and children with developmental language disorder (DLD). It explores variation in the way that SR tasks are administered and/or evaluated and examines whether variability in the reported ability of SR to detect DLD is related to these differences. Four databases were searched to identify studies that had used an SR task on groups of monolingual children with DLD and TD children. Searches produced 3,459 articles, of which, after screening, 66 were included in the systematic review. A multilevel meta-analysis was then conducted using 46 of these studies. Multiple preregistered subgroup analyses were conducted in order to explore the sources of heterogeneity. The systematic review found a great deal of methodological variation, with studies spanning 19 languages, 39 SR tasks, and four main methods of production scoring. There was also variation in study design, with different sampling (clinical and population sampling) and matching (age and language matching) methods. The overall meta-analysis found that, on average, TD children outperformed children with DLD on the SR tasks by 2.08 SDs. Subgroup analyses found that effect size only varied as a function of the matching method and language of the task. Our results indicate that SR tasks can distinguish children with DLD from both age- and language-matched samples of TD children. The usefulness of SR appears robust to most kinds of task and study variation. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25864405.

Objective:Sentence repetition (SR) task performance is related to various cognitive abilities and not just learning and memory, as is commonly considered (e.g., Baron, 2018). Bartlett (2018) was the first to examine the associations among SR performance and other cognitive abilities within a single study, using a normative sample. Bartlett (2018) found that SR performance was predicted by language, auditory verbal working memory, processing speed, and nonverbal cognitive ability of which only language abilities and auditory verbal memory significantly added to the prediction. However, no study to date has examined the associations between SR and other cognitive abilities in a clinical sample of school-aged children. The present study sought to determine the extent to which language, working memory, nonverbal abilities (visuospatial processing and fluid reasoning), and processing speed predict children’s SR in a clinical sample.Participants and Methods:Children 6 to 14 years of age (N = 191; 65% males) were included in the present study. Participants were drawn from two separate archival data populations of children referred for neuropsychological assessment in southwestern Ontario. SR scores were obtained from performance on Benton’s (1965) sentence repetition task. Language, working memory, fluid reasoning, visual perception, and processing speed were measured with Index scores from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (5th edition). The association of each of these cognitive domains with SR was determined by multiple linear regression. The effects of age and sex on SR were also examined (N = 226; 64% males).Results:A multiple linear regression model including the five independent variables significantly predicted SR performance, F(5, 185) = 30.306, p < .001., adj. R2 = .435. Only language and working memory added significantly to the prediction, p < .05. A mediation analysis demonstrated that processing speed indirectly predicted SR performance through working memory, b=.0241, [95% BCa [CI .0132, .0355]. A moderate positive correlation was found between age and SR performance, r(226) = .416, p < .001. Sex was unrelated to SR performance.Conclusions:The findings from this study are consistent with other studies indicating that SR taps multiple cognitive abilities. In a large and representative clinical sample of children referred for assessment due to academic or other learning difficulties, language plays as significant a role in SR performance as does auditory verbal attention and working memory. An advantage of the present study was the use of clinically relevant summary measures of cognitive domains associated with intelligence testing.

Sentence repetition and non-word repetition tests are widely used measures of language processing which are sensitive to language ability. Surprisingly little previous work has investigated whether children’s socio-economic status (SES) affects their sentence and non-word repetition accuracy. This study investigates sentence and non-word repetition using an adaptation of the Grammar and Phonology Screening (GAPS) test. The sample comprised 126 typically-developing Spanish-monolingual Chilean children aged 5;6 from low ( n = 65) and high ( n = 61) socio-economic status (SES) families. The results revealed that the high SES group scored significantly higher than the low SES group in the sentence repetition task, but there was no group difference for non-word repetition. The high SES group also scored significantly higher on a measure of vocabulary comprehension, and when vocabulary comprehension was taken into account, the group difference in sentence repetition was no longer significant. The authors examine how the differential effect of SES on sentence and non-word repetition might be explained by differences in the language and cognitive mechanisms involved in the two tasks, and discuss the clinical implications of their findings.

Sentence repetition performance is attracting increasing interest as a valuable clinical marker for primary (or specific) language impairment (LI) in both monolingual and bilingual populations. Multiple aspects of memory appear to contribute to sentence repetition performance, but non-verbal memory has not yet been considered. To explore the relationship between a measure of non-verbal auditory working memory (NVWM) and sentence repetition performance in a sample of bilingual children with LI. Forty-seven school-aged Spanish-English bilingual children with LI completed sentence repetition and non-word repetition tasks in both Spanish and English as well as an NVWM task. Hierarchical multiple linear regression was used to predict sentence repetition in each language using age, non-word repetition and NVWM. NVWM predicted unique variance in sentence repetition performance in both languages after accounting for chronological age and language-specific phonological memory, as measured by non-word repetition. Domain-general memory resources play a unique role in sentence repetition performance in children with LI. Non-verbal working memory weaknesses may contribute to the poor performance of children with LI on sentence repetition tasks.

Objectives: Sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) are clinically useful tasks for examining working memory ability and discriminating residual language delay. This study aims to examine sentence repetition skills by groups of children with SSDs and analyze error types and morphosyntactic strengths and weaknesses in SRTs. Methods: Thirty-four children aged 5-7 years with SSDs were classified into groups with articulation disorders, phonological delays, and phonological disorders. SRTs were conducted, and errors in SRTs were analyzed in terms of lexical and grammatical morphemes and children’s sentence repetition (SR) skills were examined by two scoring systems including or excluding articulation errors. Results: In SRTs, children with phonological disorders showed more omission errors; in particular, omission of grammatical morphemes, and sentence paraphrase errors were more frequent. Children with phonological disorders showed more lexical grammatical morpheme errors than the other subgroups. Even in the scoring system that reflects both language and articulation errors, children with phonological disorders showed a lower performance than children with articulation disorders. Conclusion: Children with phonological disorders exhibited morphosyntactic weakness by showing greater difficulties in repeating grammatical morphemes accurately in SRTs. This finding suggests that systematic grammar intervention should be addressed for children with phonological disorders.

Purpose The purpose of this study was (a) to examine the underlying components or factor structure of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA; Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, 2014 ) sentence repetition task and (b) to examine the relationship between Spanish-English speaking children's sentence repetition and vocabulary performance. Method Participants were 291 Spanish-English speaking children in kindergarten and 1st grade. Item analyses were used to evaluate the underlying factor structure for each language version of the sentence repetition tasks of the BESA. The tasks were then examined in relation to a measure of English receptive vocabulary. Results Bifactor models, which include a single underlying general factor and multiple specific factors, provided the best overall model fit for both the Spanish and English versions of the task. There was no relation between children's overall Spanish sentence repetition performance and their English vocabulary. However, children's pronoun, noun phrase, and verb phrase item scores in Spanish significantly predicted their English vocabulary scores. For English sentence repetition, both children's overall performance and their specific performance on the noun phrase items were predictors of their English vocabulary scores. Follow-up analyses revealed that, for the purposes of clinical assessment, the BESA sentence repetition tasks can be considered essentially unidimensional, lending support to the current scoring structure of the test. Conclusions Study findings suggest that sentence repetition tasks can provide insight into Spanish-English speaking children's vocabulary skills in addition to their morphosyntactic skills when used on a broad research scale. From a clinical assessment perspective, results indicate that the sentence repetition task has strong internal validity and support to the use of this measure in clinical practice.

Sentence repetition task has been proven to be a tool that can detect language difficulties and is indicative of abnormal language. In Malaysia, studies on the language abilities of bilingual children in sentence repetition (SR) tasks are sparse. Therefore, this study is aimed at examining the morphosyntactic abilities of 60 bilingual Malay children aged 4;0 to 6;11 based on SR tasks in Malay (L1) and English (L2). In the SR task, participants were asked to listen carefully to sentences being read out and then repeat verbatim the sentences heard. Their responses were scored based on accuracy, syntax, grammar, and word categories. The findings demonstrated a significant difference between the two languages in terms of accuracy [df= 118, t=1.990, p= .049]; the Malay language had statistically higher scores compared to English scores. There was also a significant difference on the performance based on age factor, [Malay (df5,54=3.561, p= .007); English (df5,54=2.894, p= .022)]. The results also revealed that the omission of both content and function words was more prominent compared to other error types. A triangulation of the quantitative and qualitative data was done. The findings highlighted the morphosyntactic abilities of the bilingual children in both languages and error patterns produced.

Objectives: This study investigated receptive vocabulary and morphosyntactic skills of children with dyslexia, poor comprehension, and typically developing children in grade 3 to 6. Methods: A total of 45 children with dyslexia, poor comprehension, and typically developing children participated. In order to qualify for each group, children with dyslexia scored below 85 on the word decoding test, and poor comprehenders scored below 85 on the reading comprehension, but scored above 90 on decoding test. Typically developing children scored a standard score of 90 on both decoding and reading comprehension. All children were administered a receptive vocabulary, sentence comprehension, sentence repetition, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness tasks. Results: The results showed that there were significant differences in all language tasks. Poor comprehenders scored the lowest on all tasks, followed by children with dyslexia. In the results receptive vocabulary task, there were differences between all three groups; and poor comprehenders performed lower than children with dyslexia and typically developing children on sentence comprehension. In the sentence repetition task, children with poor reading comprehension and dyslexia showed lower performance than typically developing children. Additionally, there were only differences between poor comprehenders and typically developing children in the morphological and syntactic awareness tasks. Conclusion: Poor comprehenders showed difficulties in vocabulary and morphosyntax, and children with dyslexia exhibited weakness of vocabulary and sentence repetitions that require linguistic knowledge and phonological memory. Their weakness of oral language may negatively influence reading development.

ABSTRACTNumerous investigations have identified weaknesses in speech processing and language skills in children with dyslexia; however, little is known about these abilities in children with reading difficulties (RD). The primary objective of this investigation was to determine the utility of auditory speech processing tasks in differentiating children with RD from those with typical reading skills. It was hypothesized that children, who perform below grade level in reading, would also show poorer performance on both dichotic listening and sentence repetition tasks because of the reciprocal influences of deficient auditory speech processing and language abilities. A total of 180 Hungarian-speaking, monolingual 8-, 9- and 10-year-old children, with and without RD, participated in dichotic listening and sentence repetition (modified by noise and morphosyntactic complexity) tasks. Performances were compared across ability groups, age and gender. Children with RD evidenced significantly poorer performance than controls on both tasks. Effects for age and gender were more noticeable in students with RD. Our findings support the notion that reading deficiencies are also associated with poor auditory speech processing and language abilities in cases where dyslexia is not diagnosed. We suggest that these tasks may be used as easy and fast screening tests in the identification of RD.

Recent research suggests that nonword repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR) tasks can be used to discriminate between children with SLI and their typically developing age-matched (TDAM) and younger (TDY) peers. Fourteen Cantonese-speaking children with SLI and 30 of their TDAM and TDY peers were compared on NWR and SR tasks. NWR of IN nonwords (CV combinations attested in the language) and OUT nonwords (CV combinations unattested in the language) were compared. SR performance was compared using 4 different scoring methods. The SLI group did not score significantly lower than the TDAM group on the test of NWR (overall results were TDAM = SLI > TDY). There were nonsignificant group differences on IN syllables but not on OUT syllables. The results do not suggest a limitation in phonological working memory in Cantonese-speaking children with SLI. The SR task discriminated between children and their TDAM peers but not between children with SLI and their TDY peers matched for mean length of utterance. SR but not NWR discriminates between children with SLI and their TDAM peers. Poorer NWR for English-speaking children with SLI might be attributable to weaker use of the redintegration strategy in word repetition. Further cross-linguistic investigations of processing strategies are required.

Purpose The aim of the study was to explore the potential of performance on a Danish sentence repetition (SR) task-including specific morphological and syntactic properties-to identify difficulties in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) relative to typically developing (TD) children. Furthermore, the potential of the task as a clinical marker for Danish DLD was explored. Method SR performance of children with DLD aged 5;10-14;1 (years;months; n = 27) and TD children aged 5;3-13;4 (n = 87) was investigated. Results Compared to TD same-age peers, children with DLD were less likely to repeat the sentences accurately but more likely to make ungrammatical errors with respect to verb inflection and use of determiners and personal pronouns. Younger children with DLD also produced more word order errors that their TD peers. Furthermore, older children with DLD performed less accurately than younger TD peers, indicating that the SR task taps into morphosyntactic areas of particular difficulty for Danish children with DLD. The classification accuracy associated with SR performance showed high levels of sensitivity and specificity (> 90%) and likelihood ratios indicating good identification potential for clinical and future research purposes. Conclusion SR performance has a strong potential for identifying children with DLD, also in Danish, and with a carefully designed SR task, performance has potential for revealing morphosyntactic difficulties. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.10314437.

The clinical significance of sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) for assessing children's language ability is well-recognized. SRT has been identified as a good clinical marker for children with (specific) language impairment as it shows high diagnostic accuracy levels. Furthermore, qualitative analysis of repetition samples can provide information to be used for intervention protocols. Despite the fact that SRT is a familiar task in assessment batteries across several languages, it has not yet been measured and validated in bilectal settings, such as Cypriot Greek, where the need for an accurate screening tool is urgent. The aims of the current study are three-fold. First, the performance of a group of (Cypriot) Greek-speaking children identified with SLI is evaluated using a SRT that elicits complex morphosyntactic structures. Second, the accuracy level of the SRT for the identification of SLI is explored. Third, a broad error analysis is carried out to examine and compare the morphosyntactic abilities of the participating children. A total of 38 children aged 5–9 years participated in this study: a clinical group of children with SLI (n = 16) and a chronological age-matched control group (n = 22). The ability of the children to repeat complex morphosyntactic structures was assessed using a SRT consisting of 24 sentences. The results showed that the SRT yielded significant differences in terms of poorer performance of children with SLI compared to typically developing peers. The diagnostic accuracy of the task was validated, since regression analysis showed that the task is sensitive and specific enough to identify children with SLI. Finally, qualitative differences between children with SLI and those with TLD regarding morphosyntactic abilities were detected. This study showed that a SRT that elicits morphosyntactically complex structures could be a potential clinical indicator for SLI in Cypriot Greek. The task has the potential to be used as a referral criterion in order to identify children whose language needs to be evaluated further. Implications for speech–language therapists and policy-makers are discussed.

Research on language acquisition and disorders highlights the need to evaluate the early phases of language development for the early identification of children with language problems (screening), and to determine the nature and severity of language disorders (diagnosis). The paper presents a new Sentence Repetition Task developed for evaluating language abilities in Italian pre-schoolers. Two studies are reported. The first is aimed at evaluating the power of the Sentence Repetition Task in discriminating the developmental changes in children's capacity to repeat sentences of different length and morphosyntactic complexity. Moreover, the test-retest reliability was assessed. The second study explored the relationship between the Sentence Repetition Task, free speech and verbal memory span. The test included 27 sentences of different length and complexity. Each sentence was accompanied with a picture reproducing its global meaning. In Study 1, the Sentence Repetition Task was administrated to 100 middle- and lower-class children (balanced for gender) between 2 and 4 years with a test-retest design. Test results were submitted to univariate analysis of variance, using five age levels as independent variables. To evaluate the test reliability, test-retest correlational analyses were conducted. In Study 2, 25 middle- and lower-class children between 2 and 4 years of age, balanced for age and gender, participated. The performance of the children on the repetition test was compared with their spontaneous language data. Moreover, the same children received a Verbal Memory Span test, consisting of a list of ten strings of different number of words. Correlational analyses were conducted to evaluate the relationships between the Sentence Repetition Task, free speech and the Verbal Memory Span test. Study 1 showed that 2-year-old children's repeated sentences were highly telegraphic. Between the age of 2.0 and 2.6 the mean length of utterance in the Sentence Repetition Task grew from approximately two to three words, and the number of omissions of articles, prepositions and modifiers significantly decreased. After 3.0 years old, omissions of free function words practically disappeared. The results of Study 2 showed that mean length of utterance, omission of articles and use of the verbs in the Sentence Repetition Task correlated with the same measures of the free speech. Moreover, positive correlations were found between verbal memory span and performance of both the repetition task and the free speech. Results demonstrate that the repetition test is reliable, discriminates between the different age groups examined, highlights the relevant developmental stages described in the literature, and provides a reliable measure of the mean length of utterance.