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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2020

Amy S. Pratt Open the ORCID record for Amy S. Pratt [Opens in a new window] ,
Elizabeth D. Peña  and
Lisa M. Bedore
Amy S. Pratt*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
Elizabeth D. Peña
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
Lisa M. Bedore
Affiliation:
Temple University
*
Address for correspondence: Amy S. Pratt, Email: apratt1@uci.edu
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

bilingual developmentlanguage disorderssentence repetition
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , March 2021 , pp. 305 - 318
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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