Validation study and introduction of the new TEPO sentence comprehension test for children aged 3-8 years
Abstract
Aim: The ability to understand can be impaired in children with neurodevelopmental disorders, including developmental language disorder, autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit disorder and learning disability. The aim of this article is to introduce a new test, TEPO, which is designed to assess sentence comprehension in children aged 3-8 years.
Materials and methods: Data collection was conducted between 2018 and 2021, the basic set of 863 children consisted of healthy children (N = 335), children with articulation disorder (N = 296) and children with developmental language disorder (N = 232). The norms were validated on children without developmental language disorder and were defined per three months of age using percentile bands.
The deficit band is defined by performance in the <= 5th percentile. Results: Significant diagnostic validity of the test was demonstrated (discrimination across age in groups of healthy children and children with articulatory disorders compared to the group of children with language disorders was statistically significant; p < 0.001) with concurrent validity (rs= 0.826 and rs= 0.863, respectively) and internal validity (Cronbach's α = 95), high sensitivity and specificity (82.4 -100 % and 87-100 %, respectively).
Negative and positive predictive value and cut-off score were also determined. Conclusion: TEPO has the potential to screen comprehension in children across all elemental diagnoses in which comprehension impairment occurs.
It also allows a partial differential-diagnostic distinction of the pathomechanism of the disorder, i.e., if the errors in comprehension are due to difficulties in understanding lexical or grammatical-syntactic structures.