Elicited imitation: its effectiveness for speech and language screening

The authors explored the clinical usefulness of a brief sentence-repetition screening task (SRST), by screening 382 kindergarten children and performing follow-up tests on a stratified sample of 78. Results indicate that an elicited-imitation task can predict the combined outcome of receptive and expressive language problems, as well as articulation problems. Replication, cross-validation and assessment of children with selective receptive impairments are recommended. Nevertheless, the present study demonstrates that the use of sentence-repetition screening tasks could be a very efficient strategy for screening for both language and articulation problems in kindergarten children.