Sentence repetition task as a powerful diagnostic tool in French children with SLI

Sentence repetition is considered as a psycholinguistic marker of specific language impairment (SLI) (i.e., Redmond et al., 2011). However, little is known about specificity and sensitivity for most language tests, especially in French (Thordardottir et al., 2011). This study aims at assessing the specificity and sensitivity of a sentence repetition task frequently used in clinical evaluations (Chevrie-Muller et al., 2010). This task could be especially interesting because clinicians can compute separate linguistic scores depending on the answers produced by the children, enabling them to get a glimpse of the areas of language difficulties in these children.
Fourty-four school-age children with SLI, and 34 age-and-IQ-matched controls participated in this study. Children with SLI were diagnosed by certified speech-language pathologists and attained specific language classes in special needs schools from at least one year. Moreover, they scored more than -1.25 SD below expected normative performance in at least 2 language areas on other standardised tests used in previous studies including French children with SLI.
Results show that both sensitivity and specificity of general scores were high (over 80%) at three cut-off points widely used in clinical practice: -1SD, -1.25 SD, -2 SD. Moreover, an exploratory factorial analysis indicates that two distinct factors can be dissociated in children productions: a morphosyntactic factor and a lexico-semantic factor, together explaining 96.48% of the variance in production scores.
These results reveal that the sentence repetition task is a powerful diagnostic tool in French children with SLI.