A Sentence Repetition Task in Spanish language: a valid tool for early language assessment.
Natalia Bravo Cerro, Miguel Lázaro López-Villaseñor, Irene Rujas Pascual and 1 others
PMID 37729255WHAT IT FOUND
Twenty Spanish-speaking toddlers aged 2 to 4 repeated sentences more accurately six months later.
Early scores predicted later language test results, suggesting this sentence repetition task can track development in young children, though the small sample limits certainty.
Key findings
01Children's ability to repeat sentences improved significantly over six months, with the average number of correct sentences rising from 15.70 to 22.60 out of 33.
02Performance on the Sentence Repetition Task at the first assessment strongly predicted scores on a standardized language test six months later.
03The task scores correlated highly with other language measures, including nonword repetition and the Merrill-Palmer-R expressive language scale, at the same time point.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 20 children, which is a very small sample for establishing predictive validity. All participants were monolingual Spanish speakers with no known hearing loss or speech therapy history, so results may not apply to bilingual children or those with clinical conditions. The children were typically developing, meaning the study did not test whether the task can accurately distinguish children with language disorders from those without. The authors note that while they believe the improvement was due to development, the effect of simply repeating the task (practice effects) cannot be completely ruled out.
Declared interests
The research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use this task to diagnose language disorders in individual patients. The study only looked at 20 typically developing children, so it shows the task tracks normal growth, but it does not prove the task can accurately identify children with Developmental Language Disorder.