Sentence repetition in Danish DLD (Christensen, 2019)

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 S1. Individual characteristics for participants with DLD with respect to age, gender, and test scores.

Christensen, R. V. (2019). Sentence repetition: A clinical marker for developmental language disorder in Danish. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_JSLHR-L-18-0327