Screening school-age children for developmental language disorder in primary care

Abstract

Purpose: To evaluate the feasibility, preliminary diagnostic accuracy and reliability of a screening tool for developmental language disorder (DLD) in early school-age children seen in a paediatric primary care setting.

Method: Sixty-six children aged 6–8years attending well-child visits at a large urban paediatric clinic participated. Parents completed a five-item questionnaire and children completed a 10-item sentence repetition task. A subset of participants (n = 25) completed diagnostic testing for DLD. Exploratory cut-offs were developed for the parent questionnaire, the child sentence repetition task and the combined score.

Result: The screening tool could be reliably implemented in 2 min by personnel without specialty training. The best diagnostic accuracy measures were obtained by combining the parent questionnaire and child sentence repetition task. The tool showed strong internal consistency, but the parent and child scores showed only moderate agreement.

Conclusion: The screening tool is promising for utilisation in primary care clinical settings but should first be validated in larger and more diverse samples. Both the parent and child components of the screening contributed to the preliminary findings of high sensitivity and specificity found in this study. Screening for DLD in school age children can increase awareness of an under-recognised disorder.

Keywords:

• identification
• diagnostic accuracy
• developmental disorders
• paediatricians

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Klaudia Bednarczyk, Tirsit Berhanu, Allison Byrne, Rachel Slager and Omar Taibah for their assistance with data collection and management.

Declaration of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, Grant # R03DC013760.