Sentence repetition

Sentence repetition (SRep) tasks have been shown to be very sensitive and specific in identifying children with language impairment in monolingual populations (Conti-Ramsden et al., 2001) among others. Sensitivity measures the proportion of children who have language impairment and score very low in a specific task; specificity, in contrast, measures the proportion of children with typical language development (TLD) who do not score low in a specific task. Poor sensitivity may lead to under-diagnosis of specific language impairment (SLI), whereas poor specificity may lead to over-diagnosis. In a seminal paper, Conti-Ramsden et al. (2001) showed that sentence recall from Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals 3 (CELF-3) (Semel et al., 1995) had 90% sensitivity and 85% specificity, much higher than measures for non-word repetition (78% sensitivity, 87% specificity), past tense (74% sensitivity, 89% specificity) and third singular –s (63% sensitivity, 90% specificity). These figures illustrate nicely that SRep tasks are more challenging for children with language impairment than other tasks and this is why 90% of children with language impairment score below the cut-off point. At the same time, they are more challenging for some children with TLD as well and this is why 15% of monolingual children with TLD score below the cut-off point, a higher proportion than on all other tasks.