Sentence Repetition : What Does the Task

Background: Sentence repetition is gaining increasing attention as a source of information about children’s sentence-level abilities in clinical assessment, and as a clinical marker of Specific Language Impairment. However, it is widely debated what the task is testing and therefore how informative it is. Aims: The study aims to: i) evaluate the effects of different types of long-term linguistic knowledge on immediate recall, ii) assess age sensitivity of repetition tasks designed to evaluate these effects and iii) establish if the effects are similar across typologically different languages. The study also considers the implications of the findings for the use of sentence repetition as a research and clinical assessment tool. Methods & Procedures: Participants were 50 English-speaking and 50 Czech-speaking typically developing 4-5-year-olds. Children’s ability to recall sequences of items was compared in seven linguistic conditions, ranging from fully well-formed sentences to sequences of nonwords. In each condition, children repeated blocks of successively longer stimuli to establish their span. Outcomes & Results: Results showed significant but differential effects of all linguistic factors in both languages. While syntactic violations and presence of nonwords dramatically reduced children’s span, semantic implausibility and the removal of sentence prosody played a significant but much smaller role. Familiarity of function words was more important than SENTENCE REPETITION: WHAT DOES THE TASK MEASURE? 3 familiarity of content words. The effects of different linguistic factors on spans were the same for both languages and did not change between 4 and 5 years, although average spans increased over this age range. Conclusions & Implications: Children’s ability to repeat sentences is more dependent on their familiarity with morphosyntax and lexical phonology than semantics or prosody, with function words of particular importance. Findings have implications for the use of recall in clinical assessment and as a research tool. What is already known on this subject Repetition tasks often feature in standardised language assessments and have emerged as reliable clinical markers of language impairment in children across different populations and languages. While it is clear that sentence repetition draws on children’s linguistic knowledge, it is not clear how different types of linguistic knowledge contribute to children’s performance, and hence what sentence repetition tasks tell us about language abilities and language impairment in children. What this study adds The study provides further evidence that immediate verbal repetition is highly sensitive to linguistic structures present in the stimuli. It adds to existing evidence by demonstrating that lexical phonology and morphosyntax play a key role in typically developing children’s immediate recall capacity. Findings clarify what sentence repetition tasks test and the particular contribution they can make to language assessment of children. SENTENCE REPETITION: WHAT DOES THE TASK MEASURE? 4