Identifying Developmental Language Disorder in Bilingual Children Using Narrative Measures.
Purpose: Narrative abilities offer valuable insights into daily-life communication and can aid the complex task of identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children. However, there is limited consensus on which linguistic measures are most informative to distinguish bilingual c...
| Published in: | Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research Vol. 69; no. 5; pp. 2268 - 2287 |
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
| Format: | Article |
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American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
May2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=193696216&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 193696216 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 10924388 1SM jtl: Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research issn: 10924388 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: May2026 vid: 69 iid: 5 pid: 42 pub: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association artinfo: ui: 193696216 10.1044/2026_JSLHR-25-00489 ppf: 2268 ppct: 19 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: P size: 3MB tig: atl: Identifying Developmental Language Disorder in Bilingual Children Using Narrative Measures. aug: au: Van den Eynde, Lotte Rombouts, Ellen Vandermosten, Maaike Zink, Inge affil: Research Group Experimental Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Department of Neurosciences, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Leuven Brain Institute, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Leuven Interdisciplinary Language Institute, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. MUCLA, Department of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head & Neck Surgery, University Hospitals Leuven, Belgium. su: Cross-sectional method Task performance Quantitative research Multilingualism Storytelling Analysis of variance Communication Language acquisition Children Language disorder diagnosis Data analysis Research funding Grammar Logistic regression analysis Descriptive statistics Speech evaluation Special education schools Statistics Mean length of utterance Data analysis software Comparative studies Sensitivity & specificity (Statistics) Speech therapy Inter-observer reliability sug: subj: Cross-sectional method Task performance Quantitative research Multilingualism Storytelling Analysis of variance Communication Language acquisition Children Language disorder diagnosis Data analysis Research funding Grammar Logistic regression analysis Descriptive statistics Speech evaluation Special education schools Statistics Mean length of utterance Data analysis software Comparative studies Sensitivity & specificity (Statistics) Speech therapy Inter-observer reliability ab: Purpose: Narrative abilities offer valuable insights into daily-life communication and can aid the complex task of identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children. However, there is limited consensus on which linguistic measures are most informative to distinguish bilingual children with DLD from their typically developing (TD) peers. This study aimed to quantitatively determine which combination of narrative measures most accurately classifies bilingual TD children and bilingual children with DLD. Method: Fifty bilingual TD children and 50 bilingual children with DLD aged 5– 9 years who spoke Dutch as a second language participated. Narrative skills were assessed in Dutch using both storytelling and retelling tasks. Eleven measures reflecting narrative productivity, complexity, and accuracy were analyzed across both tasks. Both group-level differences between TD children and children with DLD, and individual diagnostic performance were examined. Results: While most measures accurately distinguished between children with and without DLD at group level, they did not achieve sufficient diagnostic accuracy at the individual level. Nevertheless, combining multiple measures improved classification. The storytelling task reached 82% diagnostic accuracy using four measures, while the retelling task achieved 80% diagnostic accuracy using 10 measures. A combined approach using four measures from both tasks increased accuracy to 85%. The most informative measures were the number of utterances, mean length of utterance, number of different words, and mean number of (grammatical) errors per utterance. Conclusion: Extracting a limited set of measures from narrative tasks can provide both diagnostic effectiveness and clinical feasibility, supporting the inclusion of narrative tasks in bilingual language assessment. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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