Identifying Developmental Language Disorder in Bilingual Children Using Narrative Measures

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.32035188.