Elizabeth D. Peña

Assessment of Bilingual Children for Identification of Language Impairment: Current Findings and Implications for Practice

Abstract Children from bilingual backgrounds are sometimes overidentified with language impairment (LI) because educators do not have appropriate developmental expectations. At other times bilingual children are underidentified because educators wait to identify difficulties while children learn the second language. In this review we discuss data on language acquisition from several sources including cross-linguistic studies of typical first language acquisition and LI in monolingual and bilingual children. Based on this literature we discuss problems with current assessment approaches. We then propose a decision-making framework for identification of bilingual children who are at risk for LI. A key feature of this proposal is the importance of clinical markers for identification of LI.

What you hear and what you say: language performance in Spanish–English bilinguals

Abstract Purpose. This study assesses the factors that contribute to Spanish and English language development in bilingual children. Method. Seven hundred and fifty-seven Hispanic prekindergarten and kindergarten-age children completed screening tests of semantic and morphosyntactic development in Spanish and English. Parents provided information about their occupation and education as well as their childrens English and Spanish exposure. Data were analyzed using zero-inflated regression models (comprising a logistic regression component and a negative binomial or Poisson component) to explore factors that contributed to children initiating L1 and L2 performance and factors that contributed to building childrens knowledge. Results. Factors that were positively associated with initiating L1 and L2 performance were language input/output, free and reduced lunch, and age. Factors associated with building knowledge included age, parent education, input/output, free and reduced lunch, and school district. Conclusion. Amount of language input is important as children begin to use a language, and amount of language output is important for adding knowledge to their language. Semantic development seemed to be driven more by input while morphosyntax development relied on both input and output. Clinicians who assess bilingual children should examine childrens language output in their second language to better understand their levels of performance.

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.

The Measure Matters: Language Dominance Profiles across Measures in Spanish-English Bilingual Children.

The purpose of this study was to determine if different language measures resulted in the same classifications of language dominance and proficiency for a group of bilingual pre-kindergarteners and kindergarteners. Data were analyzed for 1029 Spanish-English bilingual pre-kindergarteners who spanned the full range of bilingual language proficiency. Parent questionnaires were used to quantify age of first exposure and current language use. Scores from a short test of semantic and morphosyntactic development in Spanish and English were used to quantify childrens performance. Some children who were in the functionally monolingual range based on interview data demonstrated minimal knowledge of their other languages when tested. Current use accounted for more of the variance in language dominance than did age of first exposure. Results indicate that at different levels of language exposure children differed in their performance on semantic and morphosyntax tasks. These patterns suggest that it may be difficult to compare the results of studies that employ different measures of language dominance and proficiency. Current use is likely to be a useful metric of bilingual development that can be used to build a comprehensive picture of child bilingualism.

Language sample measures and language ability in Spanish-English bilingual kindergarteners

UNLABELLED Measures of productivity and sentence organization are useful metrics for quantifying language development and language impairments in monolingual and bilingual children. It is not yet known what measures within and across languages are most informative when evaluating the language skills of bilingual children. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how measures of language productivity and organization in two languages converge with childrens measured language abilities on the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA), a standardized measure of language ability. 170 kindergarten age children who produced narrative language samples in Spanish and in English based on a wordless picture book were included in the analysis. Samples were analyzed for number of utterances, number of different words, mean length of utterance, and percentage of grammatical utterances. The best predictors of language ability as measured by the BESA scores were English MLU, English grammaticality, and Spanish grammaticality. Results are discussed in relationship to the nature of the measures in each of the languages and in regard to their potential utility for identifying low language ability in bilingual. LEARNING OUTCOMES The reader will be able to identify (1) why narratives are useful for evaluating bilingual language ability, (2) which measures of productivity and sentence organization in narratives best capture language ability and development in bilingual children, (3) how a bilingual or composite language ability across two languages can be determined, and (4) what relationship exists between measures of productivity and sentence organization in each language with a bilingual language ability score.

Story Retelling by Bilingual Children with Language Impairments and Typically-Developing Controls

BACKGROUND To date there is limited information documenting growth patterns in the narratives of bilingual children with and without primary language impairment (PLI). AIMS This study was designed to determine whether bilingual children with and without PLI present similar gains from kindergarten to first grade in the macro- and microstructure of stories told in Spanish and English. METHODS & PROCEDURES In this longitudinal study, 21 bilingual children identified with PLI were each matched to a bilingual typically developing (TD) peer on age, sex, non-verbal IQ and language exposure. During their kindergarten and first-grade years, children retold stories from wordless picture books in Spanish (L1) and English (L2). OUTCOMES & RESULTS Overall, TD children outperformed those with PLI on measures of macro- and microstructure at both time points. For the macrostructure measure, the TD group made significantly larger improvements in both languages from kindergarten to first grade than the PLI group. For microstructure, the TD children made more gains on their Spanish retells than their English retells. However, the PLI childrens microstructure scores did not differ from kindergarten to first grade in either language. We found that macrostructure scores in Spanish at kindergarten predicted macrostructure scores in English at first grade when English experience was held constant. However, this same relationship across languages was not evident in microstructure. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS TD and PLI children differed in the development of narrative macro- and microstructure between kindergarten and first grade. The TD bilinguals transferred conceptually dependent narrative skills easily, but then had to learn independently the nuances of each language to be successful using literate language. Because most children with PLI need more exposure to establish strong connections between their L1 and L2, they had more difficulty transferring their knowledge of literate language forms from one language to another.

Effects on L1 During Early Acquisition of L2: Speech Changes in Spanish at First English Contact

Spanish phonological development was examined in six sequential bilingual children at the point of contact with English and eight months later. We explored effects of the English vowel and consonant inventory on Spanish. Children showed a significant increase in consonant cluster accuracy and in vowel errors. These emerging sequential bilingual children showed effects of English on their first language, Spanish. Cross-linguistic transfer did not affect all properties of the phonology equally. Negative transfer may occur in specific areas where the second language is more complex, requiring reorganization of the existing system, as in the transition from the Spanish five-vowel to the English eleven-vowel system.

Cross-Language Comparisons of Maze Use in Spanish and English in Functionally Monolingual and Bilingual Children.

Maze use appears to be higher in bilingual speakers than in their functionally monolingual peers. One question is whether this is due to the speakers bilingual status or to the characteristics of the bilinguals language(s). Narratives for 22 Spanish–English bilingual 4–6-year-olds and their functionally monolingual age-matched peers were analyzed for maze use. Bilingual and functionally monolingual children used similar percentages and patterns of mazes. Children produced more grammatical revisions in Spanish than English. Bilingual and functionally monolingual children used similar grammatical revision strategies in Spanish and English. Childrens maze use in each language was correlated with measures of language productivity such as mean length of utterance and number of words used in the sample. These findings suggest that the role of language is important in maze use and that bilingual children do not necessarily have greater levels of linguistic uncertainty than do their functionally monolingual peers.

The Role of Clinical Judgments of Modifiabilityin the Diagnosis of Language Impairment

The primary objective of this study was to closely examine the notion of child modifiability in response to scripted mediated learning experience (MLE) sessions that targeted narrative abilities. Forty children (25 with normal language ability and 15 with language impairment) participated in the study. Clinicians who were blinded to child language ability made judgements of childrens social-emotional behaviour, cognitive arousal, and cognitive elaboration at the conclusion of each of two MLE sessions. Results indicate that children with and without language impairment performed differently across the four domains that were observed. The strongest predictors of language ability were cognitive arousal and cognitive elaboration. Within these two domains, a composite score of flexibility and metacognition accurately classified children into impaired and non-impaired groups with 93% accuracy. A follow-up case study examining clinician-child discourse examined clinician questions and child response to questions by a child with language impairment and his age-, gender-, and ethnicity-matched peer. Consistent with the group results, findings were that the child with language impairment required more question repetition and reformulations and demonstrated significantly more “no response” reactions to inferential questions. Implications of use of clinical judgements of language learning are discussed.

Dynamic Assessment of Narrative Ability in English Accurately Identifies Language Impairment in English Language Learners

PURPOSE To assess the identification accuracy of dynamic assessment (DA) of narrative ability in English for children learning English as a 2nd language. METHOD A DA task was administered to 54 children: 18 Spanish-English-speaking children with language impairment (LI); 18 age-, sex-, IQ- and language experience-matched typical control children; and an additional 18 age- and language experience-matched comparison children. A variety of quantitative and qualitative measures were collected in the pretest phase, the mediation phase, and the posttest phase of the study. Exploratory discriminant analysis was used to determine the set of measures that best differentiated among this group of children with and without LI. RESULTS A combination of examiner ratings of modifiability (compliance, metacognition, and task orientation), DA story scores (setting, dialogue, and complexity of vocabulary), and ungrammaticality (derived from the posttest narrative sample) classified children with 80.6% to 97.2% accuracy. CONCLUSION DA conducted in English provides a systematic means for measuring learning processes and learning outcomes, resulting in a clinically useful procedure for identifying LIs in bilingual children who are in the process of learning English as a second language.