“Sentence repetition with bilinguals with and without DLD: Differential effects of memory, vocabulary, and exposure”

Postdoctoral scholar Amy Pratt (right) is lead author on an article published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition exploring the use of sentence repetition in identifying developmental language disorders.

The title of the article is “Sentence repetition with bilinguals with and without DLD: Differential effects of memory, vocabulary, and exposure.”

Co-authors are Professor Elizabeth Peña and Professor Lisa Bedore (Temple University).
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Pratt’s research investigates the typical and atypical language development of children who speak Spanish. She is particularly interested in how young children’s language ability serves as a foundation for later literacy development, and how children’s language and literacy growth can be supported via evidence-based, culturally appropriate intervention. She serves as a visiting specialist on the Language Evaluation and Development in Education Research (LEADER) project in Peña’s HABLA Lab. 

Peña is a certified Speech-Language Pathologist and a Fellow of the American Speech Language Hearing Association. In the UCI School of Education, she serves as Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Diversity and directs the Human Abilities in Bilingual Language Acquisition (HABLA) Lab. Peña's research interests include bilingualism, language impairment, and test development and treatment.

Abstract
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Though previous research has shown that sentence repetition (SR) is an informative tool for identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilinguals, little is understood about the skills that underlie children's performance on the task. With a population of 136 school-age Spanish–English bilinguals, the present study explores the contribution of verbal short-term memory, vocabulary, and language exposure on two SR tasks developed in English and Spanish. Results indicate that these skills may differentially underlie SR in typical versus disordered populations. Whereas the strongest predictors of English SR performance for typical bilingual children were expressive vocabulary and language exposure, bilingual children with DLD relied most heavily on verbal short-term memory. ROC curves to determine the classification accuracy of SR were conducted. Classification accuracy was excellent, with area under the curve reaching .92 for the English SR task and .87 for Spanish SR.