TY - JOUR
T1 - Retelling stories
T2 - Grammatical and lexical measures for identifying monolingual spanish speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI)
AU - Auza B., Alejandra
AU - Harmon, Mary Towle
AU - Murata, Chiharu
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was funded by the Ciencia Básica Program 2013, CONACyT, contract no. 0220634.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier Inc.
PY - 2018/1
Y1 - 2018/1
N2 - Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have grammatical and lexical difficulties when telling stories. The aim of this work was to explore whether language productivity measures, such as mean length of utterance (MLU), percentage of ungrammatical sentences (%UGS), total number of words (TNW), and number of different words (NDW) produced by young children during a story retell task, can be used to accurately differentiate monolingual Spanish-speaking children with SLI from children with typical language development (TLD). Fifty monolingual Spanish-speaking children between 4; 0 and 6; 11 years were assigned to one of two groups: 25 children with SLI and 25 TLD age-matched peers. A scripted picture book was read to each child and the child was subsequently asked to retell the story using pictures. Story retells were analyzed for MLU, %UGS, TNW, and NDW. Results showed significant differences between groups on all four measures. Children with SLI showed significantly lower MLU, TNW and NDW, and significantly higher%UGS when compared with age-matched peers with TLD. Results suggest that measures of language productivity obtained during story retells may be used to accurately detect differences in language performance and differentiate monolingual Spanish-speaking children with SLI from their typical peers. The findings from this study have clinical implications for assessment and identification of monolingual Spanish-speaking children with language impairments.
AB - Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have grammatical and lexical difficulties when telling stories. The aim of this work was to explore whether language productivity measures, such as mean length of utterance (MLU), percentage of ungrammatical sentences (%UGS), total number of words (TNW), and number of different words (NDW) produced by young children during a story retell task, can be used to accurately differentiate monolingual Spanish-speaking children with SLI from children with typical language development (TLD). Fifty monolingual Spanish-speaking children between 4; 0 and 6; 11 years were assigned to one of two groups: 25 children with SLI and 25 TLD age-matched peers. A scripted picture book was read to each child and the child was subsequently asked to retell the story using pictures. Story retells were analyzed for MLU, %UGS, TNW, and NDW. Results showed significant differences between groups on all four measures. Children with SLI showed significantly lower MLU, TNW and NDW, and significantly higher%UGS when compared with age-matched peers with TLD. Results suggest that measures of language productivity obtained during story retells may be used to accurately detect differences in language performance and differentiate monolingual Spanish-speaking children with SLI from their typical peers. The findings from this study have clinical implications for assessment and identification of monolingual Spanish-speaking children with language impairments.
KW - Different number of words
KW - MLU
KW - Percentage of ungrammatical sentences
KW - Spanish-speaking children
KW - Specific language impairment
KW - Story-retelling
KW - Total number of words
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2017.12.001
DO - 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2017.12.001
M3 - Article
C2 - 29274509
AN - SCOPUS:85038871748
SN - 0021-9924
VL - 71
SP - 52
EP - 60
JO - Journal of Communication Disorders
JF - Journal of Communication Disorders
ER -