[Validity of a parent questionnaire for identification of children with developmental language disorders at the age of 3 years (SBE-3-KT)].

BACKGROUND: Up to now, no German language test for children has been controlled for diagnostic accuracy. Therefore the application of language tests in clinical diagnostics is limited. The aim of the study was to determine the diagnostic validity of the SBE-3-KT, a parent questionnaire for identification of children with developmental language disorders at the age of 3 years. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Language skills of 91 children (aged from 33 to 38 months) were assessed by clinical examination and language tests (SETK 3-5, SSV) blinded against SBE-3-KT results. To calculate validity scores SBE-3-KT results were referenced to expert rating and results on language tests. RESULTS: All children who were sorted in the language disorders group according to the expert rating were also classified as having language impairment on SBE-3-KT (high sensitivity) and all children with normal results on SBE-3-KT were sorted by experts in the unimpaired group (high negative predictive value). On the other hand, 8% of the unimpaired children according to experts were false positive classified by SBE-3-KT (specificity 92%, positive predictive value 50%). The correlations between subtest measures of SBE-3-KT and SETK 3-5 varied between rSp=0.42 and 0.63 (p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The parent questionnaire SBE-3-KT can be recommended for routine use in pediatric praxis. Three year old children with developmental language disorders are identified with high accuracy. In cases of subnormal results on parent report a further assessment is necessary to clarify the subtype and the etiology of the language abnormalities.