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A Sentence Repetition Task for Early Language Assessment in Spanish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2020

Natalia Bravo ,
Miguel Lázaro Open the ORCID record for Miguel Lázaro [Opens in a new window]  and
Sonia Mariscal
Natalia Bravo
Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Spain) Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (Spain)
Miguel Lázaro
Affiliation:
Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)
Sonia Mariscal*
Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Spain)
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sonia Mariscal. Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación de la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia. Madrid (Spain). E-mail: smariscal@psi.uned.es
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Abstract

Sentence repetition tasks have been widely used in the last years as a diagnostic tool in developmental language disorders. However in Spanish there are few (if any) of these instruments, especially for younger children. In this context, we develop a new Sentence Repetition Task for assessing language (morphosyntactic) abilities of very young Spanish children. A list of 33 sentences of different length and complexity was created and included in the task. A total of 130 typical developing children from 2 to 4 years of age were engaged in a play situation and asked to repeat the sentences. Children’s answers were scored for accuracy at sentence and word level and error analysis at the word level was undertaken. Besides a subsample of 92 children completed a non-word repetition task. First results show its adequacy to children from 2 to 4 years of age, its capacity to discriminate between different developmental levels, and its concurrent validity with the nonword repetition task.

Keywords

early language assessmentgrammatical developmentsentence repetitionSpanish language acquisition
Type
Research Article
Information
The Spanish Journal of Psychology , Volume 23 , 2020 , e39
Copyright
© Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos de Madrid 2020

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Footnotes

Conflicts of Interest: None.

Funding Statement: This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Grant number PGC2018-095275-A-I00. Project entitled: Acompañar y promover el desarrollo del lenguaje en el primer ciclo de Educación Infantil: Indicadores multimodales tempranos de los procesos de comunicación y autorregulación.

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