Development of a New Test Battery to Diagnose Developmental Language Disorder for 4- to 6-year-old children

Diagnosing developmental language disorder (DLD) requires a thorough assessment of children’s oral language skills in the main instruction language. However, this is complicated due to an absence of appropriate tests taking children’s home language(s) into account in a multilingual country, where 68,4 % of children speak another language at home than the instructional language in preschool (Luxembourgish). Diagnosing DLD fairly in Luxembourgish requires adapted reference norms according to the home language spoken (see Werdel et al., 2025) and a test reflecting the uniqueness of Luxemburgish grammar.
Therefore, a novel test battery is being developed to assess four to six-year-old’s morphological and syntactic abilities in Luxembourgish. Based on theoretical models, the battery will include subtests assessing six oral language domains: plural, grammatical gender congruency, grammatical case, subject-verb-congruency and verb-second placement and finally verb-end placement. The poster will contain an overview of the test framework, method and procedure.