Dynamic assessment for the diagnosis of developmental language disorder in children: A rapid review protocol

Currently, the diagnosis of developmental language disorder (DLD) relies on the use of static assessments that compare an individual’s performance to a normative reference sample. Such assessments are susceptible to biases that can affect the diagnosis accuracy, particularly for individuals from diverse linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds. Dynamic assessment has emerged as an assessment method that can reduce the influence of these biases, since it focuses not on an individual’s acquired skills, but on their abilities to learn. It is based on the assumption that children with DLD have lower learning potential, and its measure has proved relevant in differentiating between children with and without DLD. Despite this, dynamic assessment tasks are rarely used in practice. The aim of this rapid review is therefore to identify studies using dynamic assessment in the diagnosis of DLD in monolingual or multilingual children (aged between 0-18 years), in order to provide speech-language pathologists with an overview of current dynamic assessment tasks.