Diagnostic accuracy of narrative-related skills in identifying Chinese Mandarin-speaking school-age children with developmental language disorder

Purpose: Macro- and micro-structures of narratives index different aspects of the language system. Thus, measures of narratives at macro- and micro-structures have the potential to discriminate the status of children’s language ability. The present study examined the diagnostic accuracy of a tool utilising narrative measures for identifying children with developmental language disorder. Method: Narrative samples were collected from 34 typically developing children and 34 children with developmental language disorder by using a wordless-picture story generation task. These narrative samples were scored for these macro- and micro-structures. Sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratio were calculated to assess the accuracy that indices at macro- and micro-structures of narratives discriminate Mandarin-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder. Result: It was found that a composite of macro- and micro-structure measures yields adequate sensitivity and specificity. Narrative structures, the number of different words, the total number of words, the mean length of utterance, and Chinese syntactic structures approached satisfactory sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative likelihood ratios. Conclusion: The result suggest that the wordless-picture story generation task is a valid tool for distinguishing Mandarin-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder.