Sentence repetition has been used widely as an effective screening tool to assess children with developmental language disorders (DLD). However, compared to its clinical use, little is known about the underlying mechanisms that enable the task to tap the deficits in children with DLD, mainly due to complex characteristics of the task. Therefore, the purpose of the review is to understand the task characteristics that allow it to be an effective screening tool, by inspecting the task from four different viewpoints: (a) sentence (linguistic characteristics of the task), (b) repetition (cognitive aspects of the task), (c) chunking (integrating processes during the task), (d) scoring (interpretations of the task results). First, in the “sentence” section, this review highlights how the linguistic characteristics of sentences could impact sentence repetition performance. Second, the “repetition” section considered sentence repetition as a memory task. Third, the “chunking” section provided a review of the role of chunking in sentence processing and repetition. Lastly, in the “scoring” section, this review categorized the different scoring systems that have been used in the previous studies involving sentence repetition in monolingual children with DLD. This review concludes that a variety of linguistic and cognitive characteristics of sentence repetition affect the task results in different ways depending on the difficulties of the target sentences and the participants’ cognitive-linguistic deficits.