Psycholinguistic profiling differentiates specific language impairment from typical development and from attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
OBJECTIVE
Practitioners must have confidence in the capacity of their language measures to discriminate developmental language disorders from typical development and from other common disorders. In this study, psycholinguistic profiles were collected from 3 groups: children with specific language impairment (SLI), children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and children with typical development (TD). The capacity of different language indices to successfully discriminate SLI cases from TD and ADHD cases was examined through response operating characteristics curves, likelihood ratios, and binary logistic regression.


METHODS
The Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 2001a), Dollaghan and Campbell's (1998) nonword repetition task, Redmond's (2005) sentence recall task, and the Test of Narrative Language (Gillam & Pearson, 2004) were administered to 60 children (7-8 years of age).


RESULTS
Diagnostic accuracy was high for all 4 psycholinguistic measures, although modest reductions were observed with the SLI versus ADHD discriminations. Classification accuracy associated with using the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment and the Sentence Recall task was equivalent to using all 4 measures.


CONCLUSIONS
Outcomes confirmed and extended previous investigations, documenting high levels of diagnostic integrity for these particular indices and supporting their incorporation into eligibility decisions, differential diagnosis, and the identification of comorbidity.
Redmond
Sean M
SM
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Utah, 390 South 1530 East BEHS, Room 1201, Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0252, USA. sean.redmond@health.utah.edu
Thompson
Heather L
HL
Goldstein
Sam
S
D001289:Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D002648:Child; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D055317:Evidence-Based Practice; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D007807:Language Tests / Q000592:standards; D016015:Logistic Models; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology; D011578:Psycholinguistics / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D012372:ROC Curve; D015203:Reproducibility of Results