Wednesday, February 5, 2025
2/5/2025
Project Summary/Abstract There are approximately 5 million school-aged bilinguals in the United States, and 75% of these bilinguals speak Spanish at home (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018). Despite this prevalence, there is a lack of language assessment tools for children who speak more than one language. This lack of tools results in incomplete assessment protocols that do not characterize children’s language abilities in their home language. Thus, bilingual children do not receive appropriate intervention for communication disorders like developmental language disorder (DLD), which affects their long-term quality of life (Conti-Ramsden et al., 2013). One potential solution is the involvement of caregivers in the assessment process, who provide unique insights into children’s language in a variety of contexts and may provide much needed information in the home language (Restrepo, 1998). However, these assessment protocols have focused on accuracy-based measures, which may not capture young children’s emerging morphosyntactic development (Rispoli et al., 2009). One promising language assessment tool is grammatical productivity, which assesses children’s breadth and depth of grammatical structures during language sampling to derive a productivity score (Hadley & Short, 2005). This measure has been shown to differentiate typically developing English-speaking monolingual children from their peers with DLD (Gladfelter & Leonard, 2013). The limited research available on productivity in Spanish-English bilingual children has shown that the productivity of English grammatical structures yield group differences between typically developing peers and those with low language abilities (Potapova et al., 2018). However, children’s grammatical productivity has not yet been examined in Spanish, and this is necessary to fully characterize Spanish-English bilingual children’s language ability. To address this gap, this project will develop a Spanish grammatical productivity measure from the language samples of Spanish-English bilingual children (Aim 1) and evaluate the use of Spanish grammatical productivity in caregiver reports through a culturally adaptive framework (Aim 2). We will accomplish this by first determining which Spanish grammatical structures would best contribute to a productivity measure from the language samples of Spanish-English bilingual children, a subset of which have DLD. Mirroring similar strategies employed in the development of English productivity (Hadley & Short, 2005), we will compare typically developing children’s productive use of Spanish grammatical structures to that of children with DLD, and compare children’s Spanish productivity across ages. Critically, we will also examine how our Spanish productivity measure may be adapted for use by Spanish- speaking caregivers of bilingual children through a culturally adaptive framework, thus assessing the cultural validity of this process. In sum, this work—grounded in a disorder within diversity framework (Oetting, 2018)— will assess approaches to measuring bilinguals’ home language and ultimately reduce health disparities in this population.
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