Racial Identity Perception, Social Affiliation, and Sentence Repetition in Children

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) often use sentence repetition (SR) tasks to screen children for language disorders. The influence of talker-specific sociolinguistic factors on SR performances in children remains unexplored. This study examined the influence of two sociolinguistic variables on SR task performance: whether the children's racial identity matched that of the person being repeated and whether the children perceived themselves to be socially affiliated with the person being repeated.

A total of 134 four- to 8-year-old children (55 boys and 79 girls) were tested at two public events. Each child completed an SR task with prompts produced by a Black, East Asian, and White talker and answered three questions about their perceived social affiliation with each talker. Generalized logit mixed-effects models were used to examine the relationship among predictor variables of age, racial identity match, and perceived social affiliation and the outcome variable of SR accuracy.

Overall, 67% of sentences were repeated back accurately. The Black talker and the East Asian talker were associated with more accurate SR compared to the White talker. A match between the racial identity of the child and the talker was associated with lower SR scores. No significant effect was found between SR scores and social affiliation questions. Age was a consistent predictor of SR scores; however, no evidence was found for the interaction terms with either racial identity or social affiliation questions.

The differences in SR accuracy across the three talkers suggest the potential for clinically significant differences depending on which talkers are used in assessing SR. More diverse child samples and talker samples are needed to rigorously assess the hypothesis that racial match or mismatch affects SR accuracy.

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.31446301.