The Efficacy of a Language Screening Battery for Australian Five-Year-Old Children

Abstract

A group of 282 Australian five-year-old children were screened for language impairment with a battery of tests that included a sentence repetition test and appraisal of receptive and expressive language, in single sentences and discourse, in monologue and dialogue. The failure rates for each test, or test components, varied from 12.2% to 51.6%. The failure rates were recalculated using the norms from the sample data and all approximated 13%. The validity of using some of the tests on an Australian population was questioned.