With so many languages spoken in South Africa, and so many of the cognitive tests used in neuropsychological assessment coming from western, English-speaking countries, it is difficult to conduct linguistically fair neuropsychological tests in our country with non-English first language patients. Even more difficult, is the assessment of language functions. As a result, many psychologists neglect to assess language ability in which case they may miss vital information about the person’s neuropsychological functioning.
In a study by Gagiano and Southwood (2015), English and Afrikaans sentences and sequences of numbers were constructed, and five-year old children with and without language impairment were assessed, being required to repeat aloud what they heard on a recording. The study found that the repetition of sentences, in particular, distinguished the children with and without language impairment. This, and that Martinis (2010) found that sentence repetition provides information on a child’s language skills that is independent of the influence of environmental factors, is a good reason to do further research on sentence repetition in various languages.
Suggested research:
Variations on the theme:
Please leave a reply/comment below, especially if you are thinking of doing this research.
References:
Gagiano, S. & Southwood, F. (2015). The use of digit and sentence repetition in the identification of language impairment: The case of child speakers of Afrikaans and South African English. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, 44, 37-60. https://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/187.
Marinis, T. 2010. Sentence repetition. Paper presented at the Third Meeting of COST Action
IS0804, 27-29 October, Larnaca, Cyprus.
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