Sentence repetition with bilinguals with and without DLD: Differential effects of memory, vocabulary, and exposure

Abstract

Though previous research has shown that sentence repetition (SR) is an informative tool for identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilinguals, little is understood about the skills that underlie children's performance on the task. With a population of 136 school-age Spanish–English bilinguals, the present study explores the contribution of verbal short-term memory, vocabulary, and language exposure on two SR tasks developed in English and Spanish. Results indicate that these skills may differentially underlie SR in typical versus disordered populations. Whereas the strongest predictors of English SR performance for typical bilingual children were expressive vocabulary and language exposure, bilingual children with DLD relied most heavily on verbal short-term memory. ROC curves to determine the classification accuracy of SR were conducted. Classification accuracy was excellent, with area under the curve reaching .92 for the English SR task and .87 for Spanish SR.

Cognitive Mechanisms of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Monoliterate Educational Settings: Evidence From Sentence Repetition

“…Nevertheless, SR tasks are considered as a useful tool that has been used in order to distinguish bilingual children with typical development from children with atypical development. In particular, Pratt et al (2020) investigated the extent to which verbal short-term memory, vocabulary, and language exposure have an influence on two SR tasks conducted both in English and in Spanish, testing 136 school-age Spanish–English bilinguals. The findings demonstrate a difference in SR performance between typically developing children and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) with regard to the effect of the aforementioned skills.…”

Promoting Reading Achievement in Children With Developmental Language Disorders: What Can We Learn From Research on Specific Language Impairment and Dyslexia?

“…For example, Redmond et al (2019) found that individually administered screens involving sentence repetition and past-tense elicitation tasks have high sensitivity and specificity against a range of reference standards for language impairment (see also Archibald & Joanisse, 2009). Whereas Redmond et al's study focused on monolingual English speakers, Pratt et al (2020) demonstrated the utility of sentence repetition tasks as a screen for language impairment in bilingual Spanish-English students (see also Gutiérrez-Clellen et al, 2006). Adlof et al (2017) and Hendricks et al (2019) have demonstrated the potential of group-administered screenings using sentence-picture matching tasks for identifying language impairment within samples that included speakers of mainstream and nonmainstream dialects of American English, although the sensitivity and specificity for the group-administered tasks were lower than those achieved with individually administered measures in the work of Redmond et al In some situations, the benefits in terms of screening efficiency may outweigh the costs of reduced classification accuracy of group screening instruments.…”

Relations between oral language skills and English reading achievement among Spanish–English bilingual children: a quantile regression analysis

“…For this task, children are asked to repeat sentences verbatim and receive scores based on the accuracy of their repetitions. There is strong evidence for the validity of sentence repetition tasks as measures of morphosyntactic ability for children who speak multiple languages (Fitton et al, 2019 ; Pratt et al, 2021 ). The BESA Sentence Repetition subtest has high internal consistency ( a =0.96 in Spanish and a =0.95 in English).…”