Welcome to the LITMUS Sentence Repetition website

This website provides information about the LITMUS Sentence Repetition tasks. These tasks were created initially as part of the COST Action IS0804 'Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment' funded by the EU RTD Framework Programme.

After the end of the funding period, the tasks were further developed and additional tasks were created in more languages.

About

Sentence repetition tasks have been shown to be very sensitive and specific in identifying children with language impairment. Most language assessments have been developed for monolingual children. The lack of multilingual assessments motivated the COST Action IS0804 to develop Sentence Repetition tasks across a large number of languages that can be used with multilingual children. These are the LITMUS Sentence Repetition tasks.

The tasks were constructed using a set of principles to provide comparable results across languages. This allows multilingual children to be assessed in all languages they speak. Difficulties in more than one language would strongly indicate language delay or impairment; typical performance in the dominant language(s) and difficulties in their non-dominant language(s) would indicate low proficiency in that language but no language impairment. More details about the development of these tasks can be found in the following publication and in the list of publications below:

Marinis, T., & Armon-Lotem, S. (2015). Sentence Repetition. In: Armon-Lotem, S., de Jong, J. & Meir, N. (Eds.). Methods for assessing multilingual children: disentangling bilingualism from Language Impairment. Multilingual Matters.

This web-site provides a list of the LITMUS Sentence Repetition tasks and the contact details of the researchers who worked on the development of these tasks. The web-site includes also a list of publications from studies that used these tasks.

If you are interested in using any of these tasks, please contact the relevant researchers.

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LITMUS Sentence Repetition Tasks per language

Albanian

Enkeleida Kapia (Academy of Albanian Studies, Albania & Ludwig Maximilian Universität, Germany) website

Arabic Lebanese

Laurie Tuller (University of Tours, France) website

Racha Zebib (University of Tours, France)

Philippe Prévost (University of Tours, France)

Lina Choueiri (American University of Beirut)

Arabic Palestinian

Sharon Armon-Lotem (Bar Ilan University) website

Elinor Saigh-Haddad (Bar Ilan University)

Sahar Haj Yahye, Amna Halabi

Arabic Saudi

Mada Al Hasan (University of Reading)

Theodoros Marinis (University of Konstanz & University of Reading)

Arabic Syrian

Johanne Paradis (University of Alberta) website
Redab Al Janaideh (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto)
Evangelia Daskalaki (University of Alberta)
Adriana Soto-Corominas (University of Alberta)

Catalan

Anna Gavarró (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) website

Croatian

Gordana Hržica (University of Zagreb, Department of Speech and Language Pathology) website

Jelena Kuvač Kraljević (University of Zagreb, Department of Speech and Language Pathology)

Lana Kologranić (SUVAG Polyclinic)

Dutch

Elma Blom (Utrecht University, Department of Special Education: Cognitive and Motor Disabilities, Faculty of Social Sciences) website

Jan de Jong (University of Bergen, Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, Faculty of Psychology) website

English

Theodoros Marinis (University of Konstanz & University of Reading) website

Shula Chiat (City University London)

Sharon Armon-Lotem (Bar Ilan University)

Farsi

Mariam Komeili (University of Reading)

Parvaneh Tavakoli (University of Reading)

Theodoros Marinis (University of Konstanz & University of Reading)

Yalda Kazemi (Isfahan University)

French

Philippe Prévost (University of Tours, France) website

Laurie Tuller (University of Tours, France)

Racha Zebib (University of Tours, France)

Gaelic

Vicky Chondrogianni (University of Edinburgh) website

Morna Butcher (University of Edinburgh)

Maria Garrafffa (Heriot-Watt University)

German

Cornelia Hamann (University of Oldenburg) website

Lina Abed Ibrahim (University of Oldenburg) website

Solveig Chilla (University of Flensburg)
Esther Ruigendijk (University of Oldenburg)

Greek Cypriot

Kleanthes K, Grohmann (University of Cyprus) website

Maria Kambanaros (Cyprus University of Technology)

Greek Standard

Vicky Chondrogianni (University of Edinburgh) website

Ianthi Tsimpli (University of Cambridge) website

Maria Andreou (University of Cologne)

Hebrew

Sharon Armon-Lotem (Bar Ilan University) website

Natalia Meir (Bar Ilan University)

Carmit Altman (Bar Ilan University)

Irish

Stanislava Antonijevic (National University of Ireland Galway) website

Ruth Durham (Health Service Executive Longford-Westmeath, Ireland)

Ide Ni Chonghaile (Health Service Executive West, Ireland)

Italian

Chiara Levorato

Lithuanian

Eglė Krivickaitė-Leišienė (Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania) website

Ineta Dabašinskienė (Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania)

Malay

Rogayah Razak (Speech Science Program, Centre of Rehabilitation & Special Needs, Faculty of Health Science, UKM) website

Norsofiah Abu Bakar (Malay language Program, School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia)

Lim Hui Woan (Speech Science Program, Centre of Rehabilitation & Special Needs, Faculty of Health Science, UKM)

Maltese (created before the LITMUS)

Helen Grech (University of Malta, Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Communication Therapy) website

Norwegian

Jan de Jong (University of Bergen, Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, Faculty of Psychology) website

Polish

Natalia Banasik-Jemielniak (Maria Grzegorzewska University) website
Ewa Haman (University of Warsaw)

Magdalena Smoczyńska (Maria
Curie-Skłodowska University)

Portuguese

Maria Lobo (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) website
Liliana Correia (Universidade do Minho)

Russian

Natalia Meir (Bar-Ilan University) website

Sharon Armon-Lotem (Bar-Ilan University)

Spanish

Silvina Montrul (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) website
Begoña Arechabaleta (University of Chicago)

Turkish

Seyhun TOPBAŞ (Istanbul Medipol University School of Health Sciences) website

Welsh

Vicky Chondrogianni (University of Edinburgh) website
Peredur Davies (Bangor University)
Enlii Thomas (Bangor University)

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Publications using the LITMUS Sentence Repetition tasks

Catalan task

Gavarró, A. (2017). A sentence repetition task for Catalan-speaking children and children with Specific Language Impairment. Frontiers in Psychology, 8:1865.

French task

Chilla, S., Hamann, C., Prévost, P., Abed Ibrahim, L., Ferré, S., dos Santos, C., Zebib, R. & Tuller, L. (in press). The influence of different first languages on L2 LITMUS-NWR and L2 LITMUS-SR in French and German: a crosslinguistic approach. In: S. Armon-Lotem & K. Grohman (eds.). LITMUS in Action: Comparative Studies across Europe. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

de Almeida, L., Ferré, S., Morin, E., Prévost, P., dos Santos, C., Tuller, L., & Zebib, R. (2017).Identification of bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment in France. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7, 331-358.

Fleckstein, A., Prévost, P., Tuller, L., Sizaret, E., & Zebib, R. (2018). How to identify SLI in bilingual children? A study on sentence repetition in French. Language Acquisition, 25(1), 85-101.

Silleresi S., Tuller L., Delage H., Durrleman S., Bonnet-Brilhault F., Malvy J., & Prévost P. (2018). Sentence repetition and language impairment in French-speaking children with ASD. In Gavarro A. (ed.). On the acquisition of the syntax of Romance (pp. 235-258). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Tuller, L., Hamann, C., Prévost, P., Chilla, S., Ferré, S., dos Santos, C., Zebib, R., Abed Ibrahim, L. (2018). Identifying language impairment in bilingual children in France and in Germany. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 53(4), 888-904.

German task

Abed Ibrahim, Lina, and Cornelia Hamann (2017): "Bilingual Arabic-German & Turkish-German children with and without specific language impairment: Comparing performance in sentence and nonword repetition tasks." M. LaMendola and J. Scott (Hg.): Proceedings of BUCLD 41, Somerville: Cascadilla Press, 1-17.

Abed Ibrahim, Lina, Lein, Tatjana, Rothweiler, Monika and Cornelia Hamann. (to appear). SLI in Bilinguals: Comparing LITMUS-Tasks to a Standardized Test with Bilingual Norms. In: dos Santos. Proceedings of Bisli 2015.

Chilla, Solveig, Hamann, Cornelia, Prévost, Phillipe, Abed Ibrahim, Lina, Ferré, Sandrine, dos Santos, Christophe, Zebib, Racha & Tuller, Laurice (to appear). The influence of different first languages on L2 LITMUS-NWR and L2 LITMUS-SRT in French and German: a crosslinguistic approach. In : Kleanthes Grohmann & Sharon Armon-Lotem (eds.), LITMUS in Action: Comparative Studies across Europe, Trends in Language Acquisition Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hamann, Cornelia, Abed Ibrahim, Lina, S. Chilla, N. Gagarina (2017): "Syntactic complexity and bilingualism: how (a)typical bilinguals deal with complex structures." E. Di Domenico (Hg.): Complexity in Acquisition, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 142-178.

Hamann, C. and Abed Ibrahim, L., (2017): Methods for identifying specific language impairment in bilingual populations in Germany. Frontiers in Communication 2: 16.

Hamann, C., Abed Ibrahim, L. and D. Öwerdieck (2018): Identifying specific language impairment across different bilingual populations: German Sentence Repetition Task. In Anne B. Bertolini and Maxwell J. Kaplan (eds): Proceedings of the 42nd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 1-14. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Hamann, C. , S. Chilla and L. Abed Ibrahim (to appear). Language assessment tools for Arabic speaking refugee children. Submitted to a special issue of Applied Psycholinguistics.

Lein, Tatjana, Hamann, Cornelia, Rothweiler, Monika, Abed Ibrahim, Lina, Solveig Chilla and Hilal San (2015): SLI in Bilinguals: Testing Complex Syntax and Semantics in German, In: Proceedings of Gasla 2015, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 124-135.

Tuller, L., C. Hamann, S. Chilla, S. Ferré, E. Morin, P. Prévost, C. dos Santos, L. Abed Ibrahim and R. Zebib (2018). Identifying language impairment in bilingual children in France and in Germany. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, online preview, 1-17.

Hebrew task

Armon-Lotem, S. & Meir, N. (2016). Diagnostic accuracy of repetition tasks for the identiﬁcation of speciﬁc language impairment (SLI) in bilingual children: Evidence from Russian and Hebrew. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 51(6), 715-731.

Meir, N., Walters, J., & Armon-Lotem, S. (2016). Disentangling bilingualism from SLI using Sentence Repetition Tasks: The impact of L1 and L2 properties. International Journal of Bilingualism, 20(4), pp. 421-452.

Meir, N. & Armon-Lotem, S. (2017). Separate and combined effects of socioeconomic status (SES) and bilingualism on linguistic abilities and verbal short-term memory. Frontiers in Psychology.

Meir, N., Walters, J. & Armon-Lotem, S. (2017). Bi-directional cross-linguistic influence in bilingual Russian-Hebrew speaking children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7(5), pp. 514–553.

Meir, N. (2017). Effects of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and bilingualism on verbal short-term memory. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7(3-4), 301–330.

Meir, N. (2018). Morpho-syntactic abilities of unbalanced bilingual children: A closer look at the Weaker Language. Frontiers in Psychology.

Meir, N. & Novogrodsky. R. (2019). Syntactic abilities and verbal memory in monolingual and bilingual children with High Functioning Autism (HFA). First Language.

Irish SR task

Antonijevic, S., Durham, R., & Ní Chonghaile, Í. (2017). Language performance of sequential bilinguals on an Irish and English sentence repetition task. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7, 3-4, 359-393.

Irish English SR task

Antonijevic, S., Lyons, R., O'Malley, M. P., Meir, N., Haman, E., Banasik, N., Carroll, C., McMenamin, R., Rodden, M., & Fitzmaurice, Y. Language assessment of monolingual and multilingual children using non-word and sentence repetition tasks. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics.

Lebanese Arabic task

Saad, S. & Henry, G. (in press). L’épreuve Répétition de phrases : LITMUS-SR-Liban. In Zebib, R., Prévost, P., Tuller, L. & Henry, G. (Eds), Plurilinguisme et Troubles Spécifiques du Langage au Liban. Beyrouth: Presses universitaires de l’Université Saint-Joseph.

Malay task

Masters Project – Sentence Repetition and Non-Word Repetition among bilingual (Malay-English) Malay children (Zurr Hanis Hamim), Rogayah A Razak & Badrulzaman Abd Hamid (supervisors).

Masters Project – Nonword Repetition (NWR) & Sentence repetition (SR) as clinical markers for school aged children with Specific Language Impairment (Rahimah Yunus), Yazmin Ahmad Rusli & Rogayah A Razak (supervisors).

Final Year Project – Sentence repetition task among multilingual children (Mandarin-English-Malay). (Bryan Cho) Rogayah A Razak (supervisor).

Norwegian task

Camilla Bome & Ingrid Kongtorp Vargen (2017). The development and pilot of a Norwegian adaptation of the LITMUS Sentence Repetition task. Master thesis, University of Bergen.

Polish task

Antonijevic-Elliott, S., Lyons, R., Pat O’ Malley, M., Meir, N., Haman, E., Banasik, N., Carroll, C., McMenamin, R., Rodden, M., & Fitzmaurice, Y. (2019) Language assessment of monolingual and multilingual children using non-word and sentence repetition tasks, Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics.

Haman, E., Wodniecka, Z., Marecka, M., Szewczyk, J., Białecka-Pikul, M., Otwinowska, A., Mieszkowska, K., Łuniewska, M., Kołak, J. Miękisz, A., Kacprzak, A., Banasik, N. & Foryś, M. (2017). How does L1 and L2 exposure impact L1 performance in bilingual children? Evidence from Polish-English migrants to the United Kingdom. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 1444.

Russian task

Antonijevic-Elliott, S., Lyons, R., O’ Malley, M.P., Meir, N., Haman, E., Banasik,N., Carroll, C., McMenamin, R., Rodden M., & Fitzmaurice, Y. (2019) Language assessment of monolingual and multilingual children using non-word and sentence repetition tasks, Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics.

Meir, N. (2017). Effects of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and bilingualism on verbal short-term memory. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7(3-4), 301–330.

Meir, N. (2018). Morpho-syntactic abilities of unbalanced bilingual children: A closer look at the Weaker Language. Frontiers in Psychology.

Meir, N. & Armon-Lotem, S. (2015). Disentangling bilingualism from SLI in Heritage Russian: The impact of L2 properties and length of exposure to the L2. In Cornelia Hamann and Esther Ruigendijk (Eds). Language Acquisition and Development: Proceedings of GALA 2013 (pp.299-314). Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Meir, N. & Armon-Lotem, S. (2017). Separate and combined effects of socioeconomic status (SES) and bilingualism on linguistic abilities and verbal short-term memory. Frontiers in Psychology.

Meir, N. & Novogrodsky. R. (2019). Syntactic abilities and verbal memory in monolingual and bilingual children with High Functioning Autism (HFA). First Language.

Meir, N., Walters, J. & Armon-Lotem, S. (2017). Bi-directional cross-linguistic influence in bilingual Russian-Hebrew speaking children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7(5), pp. 514–553.

Turkish task

Boz, B. (2019). Do Some Bilinguals Have an L3 Learning Advantage and Others Don't, Bachelor thesis, Utrecht University, Netherlands, 2019.

Erdoğan, E. (2015). The Language Development Performmances of Turkish-English Sequential Bilingual Children Living in England: An Investigation in Regard of Risk for Specific Language Impairment, Institute of Health Sciences, Department of Speech and Language Therapy, MSc thesis, Anadolu University, Eskişehir, Turkey, 2015.

Savaş, M. (2019). Investigation of the Relationship between Language Disorders and Anti-Neuronal Antibodies in Patients with Rolandic Epilepsy. (Rolandik Epilepsi Olgularında Dil Bozuklukları ile Anti-Nöronal Antikor İlişkisinin İncelenmesi), PhD disertation, Istanbul University, Institute of Health Sciences, Department of Neuroscience, Istanbul, Turkey, 2019.

Welsh task

Chondrogianni, V., & John, N. (2018). Tense and plural formation in Welsh–English bilingual children with and without language impairment. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 53(3).

Chondrogianni, V., & Kwon, H. (2019). The development of English tense and agreement in Welsh-speaking bilingual children with and without SLI. Applied Psycholinguistics.

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