A Comparative Study Across Methods to Identify Adolescents with Syntactic Specific Language Impairment

BACKGROUND: Specific language impairment (SLI) is described as a heterogeneous deficit that causes difficulties in various aspects of language. We performed a comparative study of two methods of language assessment with the primary objective of determining the most effective approach for identifying adolescents with syntactic SLI and typical development (TD) in use. METHODS: A software-assisted method using E-Prime 2.0 was used to create an experiment. The participants were Malay adolescents aged 13 years old–15 years old. The conventional method was compared with the software-assisted method to assess the participants’ comprehension and production performance. Data on reaction time (RT), scoring and no response (NR) were obtained from the adolescents. RESULTS: Based on the two methods, the findings on the selection of participants for the SLI and TD groups was different. The two methods produced similar results in terms of the selection of TD group and most participants in the syntactic SLI group except for two participants who failed in the conventional method but passed the test in the software-assisted method. CONCLUSION: The descriptive evaluation of the findings suggested selecting software-assisted method as the alternative source because the provided information was detailed and this information enabled the researcher to identify the SLI group.