Emergent Bilinguals: the Relationship Between Child Language Proficiency and Language of Treatment on the Outcomes Children with Developmental Language Disorder
University of Houston
Summary
Of the 12 million children in the USA growing up bilingual, about 1 million experience Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), a disorder in language learning and use. Currently there is no guidance for speech language pathologists (SLPs) as to the language of intervention for emergent Spanish-English bilingual children with DLD. This project will examine the relationship between language proficiency and the language of intervention, considering monolingual intervention (Spanish or English) and interleaved Spanish-English intervention with the goal of improving language outcomes and thereby strengthening long-term academic achievement
Description
More than 8.5 million children in the USA speak Spanish at home (U.S. Census Table S1601, 2020) with about a half million experiencing Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), a disorder in language learning and use not attributed to limited language exposure, autism, intellectual disability, etc. (Norbury et al., 2016). Bilingual children with DLD experience language-learning difficulties in both languages, including documented difficulty with complex syntax (Gutiérrez-Clellen, 1998; Jasso et al., under review). While it is self-evident that a monolingual child should be treated in their first…
Eligibility
- Age range
- 4–6 years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Yes
Inclusion Criteria: 1. parent concerns and/or a history of receiving services in the public schools 2. age-specific cutoffs for the morphosyntax subtests for their best language (English or Spanish) on the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment. The cut-off score for best language for 4-year-olds is 84, for 5-year-olds is 85, and for 6-year-olds is 81. Using the best-language approach, these scores have a sensitivity over 90% and specificity over 80% for children between 4;0 and 6;11 years of age , which is considered acceptable for studies of diagnostic accuracy. 3. nonverbal IQ, as measur…
Interventions
- BehavioralSentence recast
Recast therapy is a well-established treatment for grammar in children with DLD. In this treatment, the adult repeats the child's own utterance, altering it to include the taught structure. It yields consistent large effect sizes (Hedge's g = 0.7-1.0) when focused on a single target and provided at a high dose (10-20 hrs. of therapy at a rate of \~1 recast/minute or \~600-1000 recasts total) for both morphology and syntax
Location
- University of HoustonHouston, Texas