Psycholinguistic Profiling Differentiates Specific Language Impairment From Typical Development and From Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Abstract

Purpose Practitioners must have confidence in the capacity of their language measures to discriminate developmental language disorders from typical development and from other common disorders. In this study, psycholinguistic profiles were collected from 3 groups: children with specific language impairment (SLI), children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and children with typical development (TD). The capacity of different language indices to successfully discriminate SLI cases from TD and ADHD cases was examined through response operating characteristics curves, likelihood ratios, and binary logistic regression. Method The Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 2001a), Dollaghan and Campbell’s (1998) nonword repetition task, Redmond’s (2005) sentence recall task, and the Test of Narrative Language (Gillam & Pearson, 2004) were administered to 60 children (7–8 years of age). Results Diagnostic accuracy was high for all 4 psycholinguistic measures, although modest reductions were observed with the SLI versus ADHD discriminations. Classification accuracy associated with using the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment and the Sentence Recall task was equivalent to using all 4 measures. Implications Outcomes confirmed and extended previous investigations, documenting high levels of diagnostic integrity for these particular indices and supporting their incorporation into eligibility decisions, differential diagnosis, and the identification of comorbidity.

Language performance of sequential bilinguals on an Irish and English sentence repetition task

“…The SRep tasks target linguistic knowledge and draw on grammaticality, plausibility, prosody and lexicality (Polišenská, Chiat, & Roy, 2015). SRep has been proven to be a good clinical marker for the identification of children with language impairment in monolingual populations (Archibald & Joanisse, 2009;Conti-Ramsden, Botting, & Faragher, 2001;Laws & Bishop, 2003;Redmond, Thompson, & Goldstein, 2011). This is due to the test's high sensitivity and specificity.…”

Language Profiles and Mental Health Problems in Children With Specific Language Impairment and Children With ADHD

“…Although these two common disorders frequently co-occur, studies exploring language abilities of children with ADHD or directly comparing these two high-incidence populations are relatively few (McInnes, Humphries, Hogg-Johnson, & Tannock, 2003;Redmond et al, 2011). Furthermore, in clinical contexts language related problems are seldom screened for as part of the assessment procedure for AD/HD.…”

“…The consequence is often behaviour with a negative effect on social and academic interaction. For some children also their language development may be compromised (Redmond, Thompson, & Goldstein, 2011). AD/HD is the most frequent psychiatric diagnosis given to children with language impairments (Miniscalco et al, 2006;Snowling, Bishop, Stothard, Chipchase and Kaplan, 2006;Tirosh & Cohen, 1998).…”

Measuring Grammatical Development in Bilingual Mandarin-English Speaking Children with a Sentence Repetition Task

“…Several studies have found that SLI children perform poorly between their typically developing (TD) peers, and other clinical groups (e.g. Redmond, 2005;Stokes et al, 2006;Archibald et al, 2009;Seeff-Gabriel et al, 2010;Riches et al, 2010;Redmond et al, 2011;Thordardottir et al, 2012). Stokes et al (2006) also found that SR has high specificity and sensitivity for identification of Cantonese SLI children.…”

“…Previous studies (e.g. Alloway & Gatthercole, 2005;Redmond, 2005;Riches, Loucas, Baird, Charman, & Simonoff, 2010;Redmond, Thompson, & Goldstein, 2011) have shown that the errors made by children with SLI differ from those made by children with autism, ADHD or dyslexia both qualitatively (error types) and quantitatively (frequency of errors).…”