Consistency of a Nonword Repetition Task to Discriminate Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder in Catalan–Spanish and European Portuguese Speaking Children

Abstract

Nonword repetition has been proposed as a diagnostic marker of developmental language disorder (DLD); however, the inconsistency in the ability of nonword repetition tasks (NRT) to identify children with DLD raises significant questions regarding its feasibility as a clinical tool. Research suggests that some of the inconsistency across NRT may be due to differences in the nature of the nonword stimuli. In this study, we compared children’s performance on NRT between two cohorts: the children in the Catalan–Spanish cohort (CS) were bilingual, and the children in the European Portuguese cohort (EP) were monolingual. NRT performance was assessed in both Spanish and Catalan for the bilingual children from Catalonia-Spain and in Portuguese for the monolingual children from Portugal. Results show that although the absolute performance differed across the two cohorts, with NRT performance being lower for the CS, in both Catalan and Spanish, as compared to the EP cohort in both, the cut-points for the likelihood ratios (LH) were similar across the three languages and mirror those previously reported in previous studies. However, the absolute LH ratio values for this study were higher than those reported in prior research due in part to differences in wordlikeness and frequency of the stimuli in the current study. Taken together, the findings from this study show that an NRT consisting of 3-, 4-, and 5-syllable nonwords, which varies in wordlikeness ratings, when presented in a random order accurately identifies and correctly differentiates children with DLD from TD controls the child is bilingual or monolingual.

Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Screening Tools for Language Disorder

“…The findings, however, could not be replicated in another study, using exactly the same test, which identified only 3 of the 10 children with language disorder ( 104 ). The difference highlighted the large variability in the performance of non-word and sentence repetition even among children with language disorders, in addition to the inconsistent difference found between children with and without language disorder ( 149 ). Another plausible explanation for the relatively higher sensitivity of using child's actual language skills lies in the resemblance between the items used for screening based on the child's actual language and the diagnostic tests used as the reference standard.…”

“…Another plausible explanation for the relatively higher sensitivity of using child's actual language skills lies in the resemblance between the items used for screening based on the child's actual language and the diagnostic tests used as the reference standard. Differences in task design and test item selection across studies may have further increased the inconsistencies ( 149 ). Therefore, in future tool development or refinement, great care should be taken in the choice of screening proxy.…”

Language acquisition in the longitudinal BabyRhythm cohort

“…The nonword repetition task proved a robust measure of phonology, which may reflect the fact that it was originally designed to mirror the demands of learning new words (Gathercole, 2006). Indeed, in the developmental language disorder (DLD) literature, nonword repetition is now used as a diagnostic marker of DLD for both monolingual and multilingual children (Ahufinger et al, 2021). Our experimental NWR task also enabled us to score toddlers' phonological development in terms of different levels of phonology such as primary syllable stress, syllable and consonant phoneme accuracy.…”

Introduction to Language Development in Children: Description to Detect and Prevent Language Difficulties

“…Following this hypothesis that children with DLD exhibit a limited cognitive load, and thus that language processing can easily overload their cognitive systems, non-word repetition has been proposed as a measure of the phonological working memory capacity and a marker of DLD [15,16]. In this sense, the work of Ahufinger et al [17] explored the consistency of a non-word repetition task of 3-, 4-, 5-and 6-syllables presented in a random order and with varied wordlikeness ratings. Their results showed that the task discriminated correctly children with and without DLD (from 5 years and 16 years) speaking Catalan-Spanish (bilinguals) and European Portuguese (monolinguals).…”