Assessment of Speech Impairment in Russian Children with Developmental Language Disorder Using the Standardized Test Battery RuCLAB

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a developmental language disorder characterized by speech deficits in children with intact hearing, intellectual abilities and motor skills (Leonard, 1998). Most closely resembling Russian term for SLI is ОНР (общее недоразвитие речи; ONR) and it is different from English in a sense, that ОНР is described as an impairment of all components of speech (Levina, 1967). All children with SLI have significant difficulties in mastering morphology and syntax; some children have problems with the phonological rules of language and speech comprehension (Feldman, Messick, 2009). According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) symptoms for pre-school children with SLI include: late sentence production, difficulties in learning new words and maintaining conversation, problems with following directions, frequent grammatical errors. Older children and adults with SLI experience difficulties in usage of complex sentences, finding suitable words, comprehension of figurative language, reading, storytelling and writing with logical sequence, grammatical and spelling errors (‘Specific Language Impairment’, 2019). Moreover, some children with SLI show secondary behavioural problems like hyperactivity, inattention, social withdrawal, immaturity and dependency (Cohen et al., 2000). For children with SLI the presence of such comorbidities as memory disorders, motoric deficits, dyslexia, ADHD, auditory processing disorders, and psychosocial disorders is also typical (Ghandour et al., 2018). For English speaking kids SLI is usually diagnosed using standardised tests as Test of oral language development: Primary (TOLDP3) (Newcomer and Hammill, 1987), Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals—Fourth Edition (CELF) (Semel, Wiig & Secord, 2003), Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL) (Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999), Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA) (Kirk, McCarthy & Kirk, 1968), Preschool Language Scale, Fourth Edition (Zimmerman, Steiner, & Pond, 2002), Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG) (Bishop, 2003), the Verb Agreement & Tense Test (VATT) (van der Lely, 2000); British Picture Vocabulary Scales (BPVS) (Dunn, Dunn, Whetton&Pintilie, 1982), Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn&Dunn, 2007), Battery for Assessment of Syntactic Abilities (BAMBI) (Friedmann, Novogrodsky, 2002), Goldman–Fristoe test of articulation (GFTA) (Goldman and Fristoe, 2000), etc. For diagnostics in Russian most of the times non-standardized, solely qualitative instruments are currently used, which could affect the accuracy of diagnostics. For diagnostics in Russia, non-standardized, solely qualitative based instruments are currently predominantly used, which could affect accuracy of diagnostics. The present study was aimed at assessing speech impairments of children with SLI. In this research, we demonstrated results of assessment by means of a standardized test KORABLIK, which allows comprehensive quantitative evaluation of speech development across all levels of speech comprehension and production, demonstrating results of its clinical approbation on the group of pre-school children with SLI. We also compared results of the clinical group with the results of typically developing children to identify the specificities of a language profile in child with SLI. As a result of the study, we identified that: 1. Mean scores of children with SLI are smaller than mean scores of typically developing children; 2. Between the groups difference is statistically significant in subtests on nonwords repetition, sentence repetition, action naming and sentence production. 3. Comparison to the cut-off scores of typically developing kids identified that most children with SLI experience difficulties in sentence repetition, sentence production and discourse production; 4. Mistakes that children make are different between 2 groups; 5. Children with SLI of different levels also make different mistakes in nonwords comprehension, sentence comprehension, noun and sentence production.