Grammatical correction and morphological productivity tasks as potential identifiers of developmental language disorder in Spanish-Catalan bilingual children: a pilot study

ABSTRACT

A critical problem for Catalan-Spanish bilinguals is the lack of assessment tools to conduct valid and accurate oral language evaluations. The purpose of this preliminary study was to provide pilot data for a new potential assessment tool in Catalan. We examined the possibility that two novel tasks, a grammatical correction (GramCorr) and morphological productivity (MP; nonword and word subtasks), could differentiate between Catalan-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) with good diagnostic accuracy. Twenty-seven school-aged children with DLD (M_age = 9;1 years) and twenty-seven age/sex-matched typically developing (TD) children (M_age = 9;0 years) participated in the study. Group differences and diagnostic accuracy analyses (sensitivity and specificity and likelihood ratios) were conducted. Results showed that the overall accuracy of children with DLD was significantly poorer than that of the TD controls in the two tasks. The preliminary diagnostic accuracy results suggested that the overall test (GramCorr+MP) could be useful in identifying children with DLD (cut-off point 62.1%; sensitivity (.929)/specificity (.893); +LH (8.67)/-LH (0.80). Moreover, the overall MP task (nonword + word subtasks; cut-off point 60%; sensitivity (.897)/specificity (.931), +LH (13.00)/-LH (0.111)) appears to provide adequate information to help in detecting DLD. The nature of both tasks, their usefulness for practitioners and future steps in the design of valid tools for the identification of Catalan speaking children with DLD are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Developmental language disorder
• grammatical correction
• morphological productivity, assessment tools, diagnostic accuracy

Acknowledgments

We especially want to thank the children and their families who generously contributed with their time. We would also like to thank the teachers, speech-language pathologists, and other professionals who contributed to the study. We thank Associació del Trastorn Específic del Llenguatge de Catalunya (ATELCA) and all the schools that participated in the study. Especially, we thank the implication of Escola Santa Anna and the Centres de Recursos per a Deficients Auditius de Catalunya (CREDA) and the Equips d’Assessorament Psicopedagògic de Catalunya (EAP). Finally to Coral Mayo, Joan Tarrida and Elena Vázquez who contributed to the data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2024.2350492.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR) de la Generalitat de Catalunya [2021SGR01102]; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación del Gobierno de España [PID2020-114690RB-I00]; Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad del Gobierno de España [EDU2016-75368-P].