Sentence repetition abilities in young Colombian children from public and private school settings

Abstract

Previous research across different languages has consistently shown the effectiveness of sentence repetition tasks in evaluating morphosyntactic abilities in young children. Specifically, it has been stated that sentence repetition abilities can serve as clinical markers, helping to distinguish between children with and without language disorders. However, despite the large body of evidence in this field, very few studies have assessed the abilities of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. In this study, we administered the 20-SRT (Rujas et al., 2025), a shortened version of the 33-SRT developed by Bravo et al. (2020), to 228 Colombian children aged 24 to 50 months. These children attended child-care centers in contexts classified as either high or low socioeconomic status. The results reveal the expected age-related effects (with older children scoring higher), a nearly significant effect of sex (with girls scoring higher than boys), and a significant effect of socioeconomic status (with children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds performing better than those from lower ones). The results are discussed in the light of the task’s requirements, considering the role of socioeconomic status in language development.