## 4 Discussion  
Based on data collected from children with, at risk of, and without DLD attending kindergartens in Italy, the computerised Spanish-Italian MuLiMi DLD screening that  
Figure 9: ROC curve for Italian WSIR finiteness screening task (distinction between morphosyntactic risk, \(n=10\), and no risk, \(n=18\)), AUC = 0.900.  
automatically assesses children's language performance in both languages spoken appears to contribute to the risk identification of DLD. This has been shown by the correlations found between screening task performance and SLT, caregiver and kindergarten teacher questionnaires, as well as between screening tasks and standardised tests (convergent validity, Research goal 1). Furthermore, significant associations between standardised tests and screening tasks declared to measure the same skills indicate the suitability of the task paradigms and items applied. Performance on various screening tasks assessing the same linguistic areas in the two different languages are correlated with each other, indicating adequate construct validity. Even if no information on validity and reliability of the DNWL test can be obtained from our data due to an insufficient sample size, the available tests conducted with bilingual children show that it is possible to administer and evaluate (consolidation and testing phase) this task automatically [69]. Across screening tasks, children with a formal DLD diagnosis or with pathological scores in standardised tests indicating phonological, morphosyntactic, or lexical risk, underperformed compared to children with no pathological scores. This result indicates the discriminative potential of the tests (Research goal 2). Domain-specific risk scores were used for the exploration of diagnostic accuracy (specificity and sensitivity) of the screening tasks and yielded rather satisfying indices. These screening tasks could thus be used for the identification of possible problems across domains. Hence, the data preliminarily confirm that nonword repetition [52; 56], grammaticality judgement (WSIR) of subject-verb agreement [58], and finiteness [64] can be considered useful clinical markers. In addition to the discriminative capacity of single screening tasks, the overall scores throughout the whole screening battery were also found to have good discriminative capacity. The results of the present study indicate that the language-specific as well as bilingual overall scores represent a meaningful selection and combination of tasks that discriminates between children with vs. without DLD (risk). These results obtained in a rather limited sample need to be confirmed on larger samples in the future. Crucially, our data indicate that it is possible to assess both languages spoken by the child [33; 34] even though the person who administers the screening only masters one of them. Besides the assessment of the suitability of the Spanish-Italian screening for DLD risk identification, the large amount of children who participated in this study and managed to carry out all of the screening tasks indicates that generally the child's interaction with the online screening tool is (a) feasible and (b) motivating for children of this age, see [77]. This is of particular importance in the light of the remote modality in which this screening study was carried out in collaboration with SLT clinics and kindgerartens. Thus, the high and consistent participation rate also indicates the appropriateness and feasibility of remote assessments for DLD risk identification in bilingual children attending kindgerartens. Although even earlier identification of DLD in children is generally recommended, the use of remote, direct language assessment of bilingual children at younger ages through computerised procedures is likely to be problematic. Indeed, it should be considered that children need (a) to have had a certain exposure to both languages and (b) to have reached certain stages of cognitive and motor development to be able to process the tasks and to interact with the system.