Sentence repetition as a measure of early grammatical development in Italian.

Background: Research on language acquisition and disorders highlights the need to evaluate the early phases of language development for the early identification of children with language problems (screening), and to determine the nature and severity of language disorders (diagnosis).Aims: The paper presents a new Sentence Repetition Task developed for evaluating language abilities in Italian pre‐schoolers. Two studies are reported. The first is aimed at evaluating the power of the Sentence Repetition Task in discriminating the developmental changes in children's capacity to repeat sentences of different length and morphosyntactic complexity. Moreover, the test–retest reliability was assessed. The second study explored the relationship between the Sentence Repetition Task, free speech and verbal memory span.Methods & Procedures: The test included 27 sentences of different length and complexity. Each sentence was accompanied with a picture reproducing its global meaning. In Study 1, the Sentence Repetition ...