Screening school-age children for developmental language disorder in primary care.
Kerry Danahy Ebert, Cesar Ochoa-Lubinoff, Melissa P Holmes
PMID 31262202WHAT IT FOUND
A short parent questionnaire plus a brief sentence repetition task was feasible and had preliminary accuracy in school-age children, but only 25 children had diagnostic testing, so it is not ready for routine use.
Key findings
01Only 25 of 66 children completed follow-up diagnostic testing.
02The combined parent and child screening showed perfect sensitivity and good specificity.
03The sentence repetition task took a mean of 2 minutes, 8 seconds, and graduate students without speech-language pathology training scored 90.9% of sentences in agreement with an expert scorer.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 25 of 66 children completed follow-up diagnostic testing, and only 5 had DLD, so the accuracy numbers rest on a very small sample. The screening cut-offs were exploratory, not pre-specified. The people who ran the screening were graduate students, not clinic support personnel, so real-world feasibility in a busy clinic is not yet shown. The tool was designed for English or Spanish use, but all consenting parents were English-speaking. The diagnostic test and the screener used similar sentence repetition tasks. The parent report was an ordinal rating and the child task was an accuracy count, and the scores were not transformed onto the same scale. Children who refused the sentence repetition task were excluded, and the follow-up group differed from the non-follow-up group in age.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the perfect sensitivity and good specificity as evidence that this screen is ready for clinic use. The accuracy came from only 25 of 66 children who completed diagnostic testing, and the cut-offs were exploratory.