Aquiles Iglesias

Father Involvement Program Effects on Fathers, Father Figures, and Their Head Start Children: A Quasi-Experimental Study.

An evaluation study was conducted to examine the effects of participation in a Head Start-based father involvement intervention program for fathers and their children. The study used a quasi-experimental research design that compared pretest and post-test measures for participants in four intervention sites against nonparticipants in geographically and demographically matched comparison (control) sites. The treatment and comparison groups were further divided into dosage groups based on the amount of time that fathers were involved in the program. The results suggest a positive association between high dosage participation in the intervention and increased father involvement with children at post-treatment. The children of high dosage intervention fathers also showed higher mathematics readiness change scores. Children in the low dosage comparison group showed a significant increase in behavior problems.

The Application of Dynamic Methods to Language Assessment A Nonbiased Procedure

Dynamic methods are discussed as interactive and process-oriented procedures for nonbiased assessment of communicative competence and language learning potential. Specifically, this study demonstrates the application of mediated learning experience to language assessment. Significant results of the study supported the hypothesis that a task matching young childrens socialization better differentiates between nondisabled and language disordered children than a static standardized measure. Dynamic methods were most effective in differentiating nondisabled children from those with possible language disorders.

Phonological Patterns in Normally Developing Spanish-Speaking 3- and 4-Year-Olds of Puerto Rican Descent

This study presents a quantitative and qualitative description of the phonological patterns in Spanish-speaking preschoolers of Puerto Rican descent. Phonological processes and nontargeted process ...

Narrative Transcription Accuracy and Reliability in Two Languages.

Recent research documents the power of oral narrative language samples to predict reading achievement in both Spanish and English in English language learners (ELLs; J. Miller et al., 2006). To document their clinical utility, this article addresses issues of accuracy and reliability for transcription and analysis of oral narratives elicited from Spanish–English bilingual children. We first reviewed the unique considerations that must be made when transcribing narratives elicited from ELLs. To demonstrate that narrative transcription is clinically feasible, we documented that a single clinician can accurately transcribe childrens oral narratives and that the measures acquired from these samples are reliable. Forty oral narratives were first transcribed by a single transcriber, and then checked and retranscribed by additional transcribers. High levels of accuracy and agreement between transcribers were observed across both the English and the Spanish transcripts. Test–retest reliability was documented for 241 transcripts produced by the ELL children. Significant correlations were observed between Time 1 and Time 2 for 4 narrative measures. These data demonstrate that oral narrative data from ELL children can be accurately transcribed and the narrative measures are stable over time, providing the research foundation for clinical use of narrative language samples.

Phonological patterns in Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking children with phonological disorders

This study characterizes the phonological patterns in phonologically disordered Spanish-speaking children who speak the Puerto Rican dialect. A single-word assessment was used to describe the mean percentage-of-occurrence and standard deviation of phonological processes and the number and type of nontargeted process errors in 543- and 4-year-olds. Analyses were made in reference to the Puerto Rican dialect of Spanish, yielding a number of specific patterns that characterized the speech of these children.

Analyzing language samples of spanish-english bilingual children for the automated prediction of language dominance

In this work we study how features typically used in natural language processing tasks, together with measures from syntactic complexity, can be adapted to the problem of developing language profiles of bilingual children. Our experiments show that these features can provide high discriminative value for predicting language dominance from story retells in a Spanish-English bilingual population of children. Moreover, some of our proposed features are even more powerful than measures commonly used by clinical researchers and practitioners for analyzing spontaneous language samples of children. This study shows that the field of natural language processing has the potential to make significant contributions to communication disorders and related areas.

Automatic generation of the index of productive syntax for child language transcripts

The index of productive syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough (Applied Psycholinguistics 11:1–22, 1990) is a measure of syntactic development in child language that has been used in research and clinical settings to investigate the grammatical development of various groups of children. However, IPSyn is mostly calculated manually, which is an extremely laborious process. In this article, we describe the AC-IPSyn system, which automatically calculates the IPSyn score for child language transcripts using natural language processing techniques. Our results show that the AC-IPSyn system performs at levels comparable to scores computed manually. The AC-IPSyn system can be downloaded from www.hlt.utdallas.edu/~nisa/ipsyn.html.

Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Preschoolers' Verbal and Nonverbal Requests.

The purpose of this study was to identify the verbal and nonverbal strategies that preschoolers used to obtain objects from peers. Two Head Start classrooms of 41 Puerto Rican and African American preschoolers were observed and videotaped over 1 school year using qualitative methods. The preschoolers used three different strategies to obtain objects from peers during play, including movements toward objects, verbal intentions with movements toward objects, and verbal intentions. The students were able to obtain objects from classmates in 40% of their attempts and were most successful when they combined physical movements toward an object with a request, statement, or claim. The strategies used by the preschoolers and their rates of success varied between the sand, kitchen, and block areas in the two classrooms studied, with children obtaining the greatest success in the block area. The implications of this studys findings for intervention in the classroom by teachers or speech-language pathologists are discussed.