De toegevoegde waarde van naverteltaken in spontane taalanalyses bij jonge kinderen met een taalontwikkelingsstoornis

Aims The current study examined whether a retelling task, next to free play, could provide additional information on the grammatical development of young children with a developmental language disorder (DLD). We compared language samples elicited during free play with language samples in which utterances elicited during free play and a retelling task were combined. The results of our study can help speech-language therapists (SLTs) with adequately assessing and monitoring children’s grammatical development using language sample analyses (LSAs). Method We examined language samples of 27 children with (presumed) DLD, aged between three and six years, on two time points with an interval of three months. Children were divided into two age groups. At each time point, two language samples with different elicitation contexts were available for each child: a combination context (retelling task + free play), and an unstructured context (free play only). We analysed the effect of elicitation context on three grammatical levels: complexity, diversity, and accuracy, using linear mixed effects analyses. We also examined the effect of elicitation context on the assessment of grammatical development between the time points. Results For five- and six-year-old children, scores for grammatical complexity and diversity were higher in the combination context compared to the unstructured context. For three- and four-year-olds, elicitation context did not affect grammatical complexity and diversity scores. Both age groups produced more errors in subject-verb agreement in the combination context compared to the unstructured language samples. Elicitation context did not influence the growth rates between the two time points. Conclusions For the five- and six-year-old children, results showed that language samples with utterances from a retelling task and free play included more complex and diverse speech compared to language samples with free play utterances alone. Adding a retelling task provides insights into the grammatical strengths and weaknesses of these children that are not captured in language samples elicited during free play only. Our results underline the importance of taking into account the elicitation context when monitoring grammatical development of young children with DLD.