Ronald B. Gillam

A Study of Classroom-Based Phonological Awareness Training for Preschoolers with Speech and/or Language Disorders.

Sixteen preschool children with speech and/or language disorders received phonological awareness training for a period of 9 months. Eight children attended a preschool classroom, and 8 children attended a pre-kindergarten classroom. The classrooms were located in a private school for children with speech and language disorders. A group of older children with speech and/or language disorders served as a nontreatment comparison group. Children in the treatment groups received 15 minutes of small-group lessons twice each week for two semesters. Classroom-based treatment focused on rhyming the first semester and on phoneme awareness the second semester. Rhyming and phoneme awareness activities were adapted from the literature on the development of phonological awareness in typically-achieving children. Results revealed that preschool children with speech and/or language disorders made significant improvement in rhyming and phoneme awareness. Comparisons with the non-treatment group indicated that gains in pho...

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 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.

Emerging Procedures in Narrative Assessment: The Index of Narrative Complexity.

This article summarizes norm-referenced and criterion-referenced measures of narration and introduces a new criterion-referenced narrative scoring system called the Index of Narrative Complexity (INC). The INC was designed to be used as a progress-monitoring tool. A preliminary study of the use of this scoring system is reported that yielded evidence suggesting that the INC can be scored consistently, yields similar scores across five elicitation formats, is sensitive to change after intervention, and correlates highly with the Test of Narrative Language (Gillam & Pearson, 2004). These results support the use of the INC as a clinical tool for evaluating the outcomes of narrative intervention.

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.

An Examination of the Quality of Narratives Produced by Children with Language Disorders.

A team of regular and special educators used a holistic scoring procedure to rate the overall quality of spoken and written narratives produced by students with language disorders and their age-, l...

Phonological Awareness Training and Short-Term Working Memory: Clinical Implications

There are two aspects of phonological working memory—phonological coding and phonological recoding—that appear to be important elements in the relationship between phonological working memory and phonological awareness. The authors explain why it makes better sense to train phonological awareness than to train phonological working memory and describe an approach to phonological awareness intervention. Outcomes of an intervention study in which training in phonological awareness affected childrens phonological coding abilities and their early literacy abilities also are summarized.

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.

Oral Reading and Story Retelling of Students with Specific Language Impairment.

Students with specific language impairment (SL) and students matched for single-word reading ability read and retold stories that were approximately one grade level above their reading level. Child...

Auditory Temporal Resolution in Specifically Language-Impaired and Age-Matched Children:

Recently there has been renewed interest in the auditory processing capabilities of children with specific language impairment. In this study, eight children with specific language impairment and eight nonimpaired, age-matched peers completed a task to assess temporal resolution abilities. Children were asked to detect a tone in three masking conditions wherein the masker contained silent gaps of 0 msec., 40 msec., or 64 msec. in duration. Thresholds were measured in each masking condition at 500 Hz and 2000 Hz. Across the groups, thresholds decreased (improved) significantly as a function of increases in the duration of the gaps. Children in the two groups exhibited remarkably similar thresholds for the three masking conditions. However, children with specific language impairment required a significantly greater number of ascending trials to achieve the threshold criterion than did age-matched children. Results suggest that language-impaired children perceive temporal aspects of acoustic stimuli as well as their normally developing peers. Attentional mechanisms may play an important role in the difficulties they exhibit in auditory processing.