Supervisors info:
1. Βαρλοκώστα Σπυριδούλα, Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Φιλολογίας, ΕΚΠΑ
2. Σκαλιόρα Ειρήνη, Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Ιστορίας & Φιλοσοφίας της Επιστήμης, ΕΚΠΑ
3. Ρούσσος Πέτρος, Αναπληρωτής Καθηγητής, Τμήμα Ψυχολογίας, ΕΚΠΑ
Summary:
It is well established that Sentence Repetition Tasks (SRTs) are able to assess children’s language abilities. Specifically, SRTs have been identified as a clinical marker for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as they show high diagnostic accuracy levels (see Marinis & Armon-Lotem, 2015). Similarly, there has been observed high sensitivity and specificity of SRT in detecting grammatical impairments of French-speaking children with High Functioning Autism (HFA) (Silleresi et al., 2018). Τhe aims of the current study are two-fold. First, the diagnostic accuracy of the LITMUS-SRT-Greek task is explored, which was developed within the COST Action IS0804 ‘Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society’. Second, due to the similarity that has been detected concerning the grammatical impairments between children with DLD and children with HFA, the acquisition of complex morphosyntactic structures of Greek-speaking children with HFA is assessed. A total of 88 children, aged 6;3-12 years, participated in this study: a clinical group of children with HFA (n = 44) and a chronological age-matched control group (n = 44). The SRT consisted of 32 sentences that examined the following structures: (a) Subject-Verb-Object, (b) Negation, (c) Clitics, (d) Complement clauses, (e) Coordination clauses, (f) Adverbial clauses, (g) Wh-questions and (h) Relative clauses. For the scoring of repetition accuracy, two different methods were followed, Scoring Method 1 (0-1) and Scoring Method 2 (0-3). Additionally, the participants’ responses were encoded according to the syntactic structures that were examined (0-1). Furthermore, a broad error analysis was conducted. The errors were classified as omissions, substitutions, additions, changes of word order and grammatical errors. For each one of those classifications of errors, the affected linguistic elements were determined as function or content words, as well as the grammatical category of those elements. The results showed that the SRT yielded high sensitivity and specificity in identifying children with HFA, as HFA participants displayed significantly lower performance in all scoring schemes and higher error frequency in all error categories in comparison with the age-matched control group. The current study showed that the LITMUS-SRT-Greek task, that elicits complex morphosyntactic structures, could be a potential indicator of Greek-speaking HFA children’s grammatical impairments.
Keywords:
SRT, HFA, morphosyntactic ability, diagnostic accuracy
