Diagnostic and Predictive Functions of Dynamic Assessments of Language Skills in Children with Developmental Language Disorder

The Centre for Language and Communication Science Research at the School of Health and Psychological Sciences, City St. George's, University of London welcomes Olivia Hadjadj to present two Dynamic Assessment tasks developed at the University of Geneva and used to differentiate children with Typical Development and those with Developmental Language Disorder without penalising bilinguals over monolinguals, as part of the research seminar series.

A light lunch will be provided.

Abstract

Static Assessment measures crystallised knowledge, while Dynamic Assessment (DA) measures learning potential, either by using a graduated prompt procedure or by using a pre-test/teaching/post-test procedure.

DA has been used to differentiate children with Typical Development (TD) and those with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) without penalising bilinguals over monolinguals.

DA tasks of morphosyntax have also been used to predict future skills in children with DLD. In this talk, two DA tasks developed at the University of Geneva will be presented:

1. a DA task of inflectional morphology, used for a diagnostic purpose
2. a DA task of narrative, used for a predictive purpose.

Study 1: A total of 157 monolingual and simultaneous bilingual children (40 DLD; Mage = 6;6) were recruited. We designed a gender and number morphological DA tasks, that followed the same procedure, with:

1. the introduction of a pseudo-verb (PV) to describe the action of some animated characters
2. the explicit teaching of the invented rule (i.e., the adding of a specific pseudo-morpheme to the end of the PV)
3. the assessment of children’s ability to apply the rule
4. the assessment of children’s ability to generalise the rule to four other PV. Graduated prompts were provided to assist children in producing the six inflected forms for each PV.

Effects of age and of diagnosis were found for both tasks, with no effect of bilingualism. Children with TD learned the rule and maintained their learning throughout the entire tasks.

Children with DLD needed more prompts and did not reach a plateau as their peers did. There was also an impact of non-verbal reasoning, only in children with TD.

Study 2: A total of 21 French-speaking children (Mage = 9;5) were recruited. We proposed a DA task of narrative, with a pre-test-teaching-post-test procedure, followed by a delayed post-test (DP) 12 weeks later.

Children engaged in a story generation (Story 1) and two story-retellings (Stories 2 and 3). The teaching phase of the DA targeted Story 2’s macro- and microstructure.

We measured DA gains and post-test scores, and DP scores, focusing on macrostructure and language complexity.

The three stories’ DPs were predicted by post-tests of Stories 1 and 3, in both macrostructure and language complexity, and by gains in language complexity of Story 2.

About the speaker

Olivia Hadjadj is a PhD student at the University of Geneva, supervised by Hélène Delage and Margaret Kehoe, focusing on Dynamic Assessment of morphosyntax and narrative.

She co-organises monthly seminars for French-speaking Speech and Language Therapists to promote the link between clinical practices and research.