Sentence Repetition as a Clinical Marker of Developmental Language Disorder: Evidence From Arabic

Abstract

Purpose: Research on the typical and impaired grammatical acquisition of Arabic is limited. This study systematically examined the morphosyntactic abilities of Arabic-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) using a novel sentence repetition task. The usefulness of the task as an indicator of DLD in Arabic was determined. Method: A LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) sentence repetition task was developed in Palestinian Arabic (LITMUS-SR-PA-72) and administered to 30 children with DLD ( M = 61.50 months, SD = 11.27) and 60 age-matched typically developing (TD) children ( M = 63.85 months, SD = 10.16). The task targeted grammatical structures known to be problematic for Arabic-speaking children with DLD (language specific) and children with DLD across languages (language independent). Responses were scored using binary, error, and structural scoring methods. Results: Children with DLD scored below TD children on the LITMUS-SR-PA-72, in general, and in the repetition of language-specific and language-independent structures. The frequency of morphosyntactic errors was higher in the DLD group relative to the TD group. Despite the large similarity of the type of morphosyntactic errors between the two groups, some atypical errors were exclusively produced by the DLD group. The three scoring methods showed good diagnostic power in the discrimination between children with DLD and children without DLD. Conclusions: Sentence repetition was an area of difficulty for Palestinian Arabic–speaking children with DLD. The DLD group demonstrated difficulties with language-specific and language-independent structures, particularly complex sentences with noncanonical word order. Most grammatical errors made by the DLD group resembled those of the TD group and were mostly omissions or substitutions of grammatical affixes or omissions of function words. SR appears to hold promise as a good indicator for the presence or absence of DLD in Arabic. Further validation of these findings using population-based studies is warranted. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16968043

Testing the continuum/spectrum model in Russian-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder

“…For example, some papers showed that the area of weaknesses for children with DLD is Sentence repetition (e.g. Pham & Ebert, 2020;Vang Christensen, 2019;Taha et al, 2021); or Nonword and Real-word repetition (e.g., Dispaldro et al, 2013;Girbau & Schwartz, 2008). However, our results do not support the single-task approach.…”

What Characterizes the Productive Morphosyntax of Norwegian Children with Developmental Language Disorder?

“…Furthermore, their responses were characterized as deviating further from the target sentences than the responses of the TD children on all the measures studied; that is to say, as a group they made significantly more errors of all types than the TD group. This is not surprising, as previous studies on sentence repetition tasks have shown them to reveal a special weakness for children with DLD, and to have good diagnostic accuracy (Komeili et al, 2020;Marinis & Armon-Lotem, 2015;Riches et al, 2010;Taha et al, 2021). Our results suggest that sentence repetition could be a useful tool for identifying Norwegian-speaking children with DLD, and the current study provides some direction as to which grammatical structures may be the most effective in distinguishing between children with DLD and TD.…”

“…During a sentence repetition task, the child processes the target sentence and reconstructs his or her response using the grammar and vocabulary available to him or her (Potter & Lombardi, 1990;2002). In addition, children may also use their dialect as a filter through which they process and respond to such as task, and thus we decided to disregard dialectal variations as has been done in similar studies in other languages (Taha, Stojanovik & Pagnamenta, 2021).…”

Sentence Repetition as a Diagnostic Tool for Developmental Language Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…However, when this analysis was rerun with just studies who used age-matched TD groups, this effect disappears, suggesting that there was a confounding effect of how TD children were matched. It can therefore be tentatively concluded that SR tasks reliably result in a difference in performance between DLD and TD groups across different languages (in monolingual children), even those with a vastly different morphosyntactic structure to English, such as Arabic (Alsiddiqi et al, 2021;Taha et al, 2021). This may be in part due to the standardising influence of COST Action IS0804…”