Identifying Linguistic Markers of French-Speaking Teenagers With Developmental Language Disorder: Which Tasks Matter?

Purpose: This research aimed to identify reliable tasks discriminating Frenchspeaking adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) from their peers with typical language (TL) and to assess which linguistic domains represent areas of particular weakness in DLD. Unlike English, morphosyntax...

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Published in:Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research Vol. 66; no. 1; pp. 221 - 239
Main Authors: Courteau, Émilie, Loignon, Guillaume, Steinhauer, Karsten, Royle, Phaedra
Format: Article
Published: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Jan2023
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Jan2023
      vid: 66
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      pub: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
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        10.1044/2022_JSLHR-21-00541
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        atl: Identifying Linguistic Markers of French-Speaking Teenagers With Developmental Language Disorder: Which Tasks Matter?
      aug:
        au:
          Courteau, Émilie
          Loignon, Guillaume
          Steinhauer, Karsten
          Royle, Phaedra
        affil:
          School of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Montréal, Québec, Canada.
          Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
          Deparment of Education and Pedagogy, Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Québec at Montréal, Canada.
          School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
      su:
        France
        Memory
        Linguistics
        Comparative grammar
        Language acquisition
        Vowels
        Phonological awareness
        Multivariate analysis
        Intelligibility of speech
        Descriptive statistics
        Logistic regression analysis
        Language disorders in children
      sug:
        subj:
          Memory
          Linguistics
          Comparative grammar
          Language acquisition
          France
          Vowels
          Phonological awareness
          Multivariate analysis
          Intelligibility of speech
          Descriptive statistics
          Logistic regression analysis
          Language disorders in children
      ab: Purpose: This research aimed to identify reliable tasks discriminating Frenchspeaking adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) from their peers with typical language (TL) and to assess which linguistic domains represent areas of particular weakness in DLD. Unlike English, morphosyntax has not been identified as a special area of weakness when compared with lexicosemantics in French preschoolers with DLD. Since there is evidence that subject– verb number agreement is consolidated in later childhood, one might expect morphosyntax to be a particular weakness and marker of French DLD only in (pre)adolescence. Method: We administered 20 subtasks that assessed linguistic and phonological working memory skills of two groups: 17 adolescents clinically identified as having DLD (M = 14.1 years) and 20 (pre)teens with TL (M = 12.2 years). Using robust statistics that are less affected by outliers, we selected the most discriminating subtasks between our groups, calculated their optimal cutoff score, and derived diagnostic accuracy statistics. We combined these subtasks in a multivariable model to identify which subtasks contributed the most to the identification of DLD. Results: Seven subtasks were selected as discriminating between our groups, and three showed outstanding diagnostic accuracy: Recalling Sentences, a multiword task assessing lexicosemantic skills, and a subject–verb number agreement production task. When combined, we found that the latter contributed the most to our multivariable model. Conclusion: This study provides evidence that the most relevant markers to identify DLD in French teenagers are tasks assessing lexicosemantics and morphosyntactic domains, and that morphosyntax should be considered an important area of weakness in French-speaking teenagers with DLD.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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