A Sentence Repetition Task for Early Language Assessment in Spanish

Abstract

Sentence repetition tasks have been widely used in the last years as a diagnostic tool in developmental language disorders. However in Spanish there are few (if any) of these instruments, especially for younger children. In this context, we develop a new Sentence Repetition Task for assessing language (morphosyntactic) abilities of very young Spanish children. A list of 33 sentences of different length and complexity was created and included in the task. A total of 130 typical developing children from 2 to 4 years of age were engaged in a play situation and asked to repeat the sentences. Children’s answers were scored for accuracy at sentence and word level and error analysis at the word level was undertaken. Besides a subsample of 92 children completed a non-word repetition task. First results show its adequacy to children from 2 to 4 years of age, its capacity to discriminate between different developmental levels, and its concurrent validity with the nonword repetition task.

Sentence Repetition Tasks to Detect and Prevent Language Difficulties: A Scoping Review

“…Considering this set of papers, data seem to be clear, with English being the most widely explored language. Spanish, being the second language in our results, was studied in more than half of the cases with Latino bilingual children (e.g., [ 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 ]), and research with monolingual Spanish speaking children is scarce (e.g., [ 14 , 37 , 38 , 39 ]). The representation of other languages is low, with most of them having only one or two published studies (e.g., in Arabic [ 40 , 41 ]; in Czech [ 20 , 42 ]; and in Kannada [ 43 ]).…”

“…It is a fact, however, that the administration of an SRT is complex with very young children as it is difficult for them to keep their attention focused on the task, and the results are heterogeneous and difficult to score. In any event, research has shown that is possible to conduct SRT with children under 4 years of age (see, for example, [ 14 ] for Spanish language, or [ 55 ] for English language). Nevertheless, it is an issue of major importance for clinicians and also for researchers interested in more theoretical aspects of SRTs to have data referring to children of this age.…”

“…These kinds of tasks should be developed in different languages, according to their linguistic characteristics and particularities, and can be used afterwards with different populations. A number of studies with monolingual children who speak languages other than English, and with bi/multilingual participants with typical and non-typical language development have been carried out in recent years (see [ 13 ] for Hebrew-Russian; [ 14 ] for (European) Spanish; [ 15 ] for Welsh-English; [ 16 ] for Catalan; [ 17 ] for Arabic-German; [ 18 ] for Hungarian; [ 19 ] for Vietnamese; [ 20 ] for Czech; [ 21 ] for Cantonese; [ 22 ] for (Latino) Spanish-English; and [ 23 ] for Danish). However, drawing on the review in [ 13 ], until relatively recently, little work had focused on diagnostic accuracy of repetition tasks (SRTs and non-word repetition) in bilinguals with SLI that speak languages other than English.…”

A Sentence Repetition Task in Spanish language: a valid tool for early language assessment

“…It is important to go beyond a mere description of the milestones in the process and get to the heart of how do the different mechanisms responsible for language acquisition work. In order to achieve this aim, it is necessary to develop simple and reliable tools to assess very young children ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) . Early assessment is essential for early detection, and early detection allows a sooner intervention.…”

“…To our knowledge no study, other than ( 1 ) , has developed a specific sentence repetition task to assess morphosyntactic abilities in typically developing Spanish-speakers younger than 4 years old. In this research ( 1 ) , designed a 33-sentence repetition task considering several variables such as the frequency of the words selected, the syllable structure, and the phonological composition of these words, as well as the morphosyntactic complexity of the sentences. It was administered to 130 Spanish-speaking children aged 2 to 4 years old.…”