The clinical utility of nonword repetition for children living in the rural south of the US

Nonword repetition (NWR) tasks have been shown to minimize cultural biases in language assessment. In the current study, we further examined the clinical utility of NWR with 83 children who lived in the rural south of the US; 33 were African American and 50 were White, with 16 classified as specifically language impaired (SLI) 6-year-olds and 67 classified as either age-matched or younger controls. Main effects were found for group, with the children in the SLI group earning lower NWR scores than the controls. A main effect for syllable length but not race was also documented. The group and syllable length effects could not be explained by differences in the children's articulation abilities or by potential differences in the children's use of vernacular dialect. Discriminant analysis indicated that NWR had a diagnostic accuracy rate of 81% for the 6-year-olds, but sensitivity was low (56%). When combined with scores from one other nonbiased assessment tool, however, the diagnostic accuracy of NWR increased to 90%, with rates of sensitivity and specificity above 80%.