Screening school-age children for developmental language disorder in primary care

Area of Science:

• Pediatric Primary Care
• Developmental Psychology
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is an under-recognized condition affecting children's language skills.
• Early identification of DLD is crucial for timely intervention and improved outcomes.
• Current screening methods may not be optimally integrated into primary care settings.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the feasibility, preliminary diagnostic accuracy, and reliability of a novel screening tool for DLD.
• To evaluate the tool's effectiveness in early school-age children within a pediatric primary care environment.
• To determine the utility of parent-completed and child-completed components in DLD screening.

Main Methods:

• A screening tool comprising a parent questionnaire and a child sentence repetition task was administered to 66 children aged 6-8 years.
• A subset of 25 children underwent diagnostic DLD testing for validation.
• Exploratory cut-offs were determined for individual and combined scores.

Main Results:

• The screening tool demonstrated feasibility, with reliable implementation in under 2 minutes by non-specialist personnel.
• Combining parent and child components yielded the highest preliminary diagnostic accuracy.
• The tool exhibited strong internal consistency, though parent-child score agreement was moderate.

Conclusions:

• The developed screening tool shows potential for use in primary care settings for identifying DLD.
• Further validation in larger, diverse populations is recommended.
• The combined parent and child components are vital for the tool's promising sensitivity and specificity.