Diagnostic Accuracy of Sentence Recall and Past Tense Measures for Identifying Children's Language Impairments.
Sean M Redmond, Andrea C Ash, Tyler T Christopulos and 1 others
PMID 31220421WHAT IT FOUND
Sentence recall and past tense marking can flag early elementary English-speaking children with language impairment, but how well they work depends on how impairment is defined.
They may miss children identified only by service receipt or parent concern.
Key findings
01Sentence recall had significant diagnostic accuracy across the reference standards, with values from .72 to .95 and optimal standard-score cutoffs from 79 to 95.
02Past tense marking had significant diagnostic accuracy, with values from .67 to .91 and cutoffs from 89 to 97, but it was the exception to adequate accuracy when impairment was defined by receiving services.
03Service receipt and parent concern identified groups with less severe language symptoms, and 22% of children receiving speech-language services were identified only by that standard.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The results apply only to the five definitions of language impairment tested, and there is no agreed-upon reference standard. The children were early elementary and monolingual English speakers, so the screeners were not tested with older students or bilingual children. Two-stage active consent probably introduced selection bias. The study did not collect teacher ratings or details of the speech-language interventions children received. The clinical sample was added to increase cases, and the community sample used provisional cutoffs and lottery selection, so accuracy may not match typical clinic caseloads. Children identified by service receipt or parent concern had less severe symptoms, so these screeners may miss them.
Declared interests
The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders funded the study under grant R01DC011023 to Sean M. Redmond. The supplied text does not report additional author conflicts.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat sentence recall and past tense marking as stand-alone diagnostic tests. Their performance varied by reference standard, and children identified only by service receipt or parent concern had less severe symptoms and could be missed.