The results presented here may stimulate future research on the print knowledge of Spanish-speaking children with LI. Sources of individual differences are important to determine. Caregivers may use the intervention presented here as a potential avenue for improving children's print knowledge.
This study examined vocabulary intervention-in terms of targets and techniques-for children with language impairment receiving speech-language therapy in public schools (i.e., non-fee-paying schools) in the United States. Vocabulary treatments and targets were examined with respect to their alignment with the empirically validated practice of rich vocabulary intervention. Participants were forty-eight 5-7-year-old children participating in kindergarten or the first-grade year of school, all of whom had vocabulary-specific goals on their individualized education programmes. Two therapy sessions per child were coded to determine what vocabulary words were being directly targeted and what techniques were used for each. Study findings showed that the majority of words directly targeted during therapy were lower-level basic vocabulary words (87%) and very few (1%) were academically relevant. On average, three techniques were used per word to promote deep understanding. Interpreting findings against empirical descriptions of rich vocabulary intervention indicates that children were exposed to some but not all aspects of this empirically supported practice.
Existing research into speci c language impairment in Spanish utilizes primarily spontaneous production data and concludes that children do not have problems with verb niteness. In contrast, we show, through a new receptive measure, the "Grammaticality Choice Task", that the distribution of the 2 most common errors in child Spanish is su cient to distinguish language-impaired children from age and language control groups. We conclude that niteness marking on verbs is a promising clinical marker for SLI in Spanish and that spontaneous measures of niteness marking do not provide the most accurate representation of children's grammatical competence in the verbal domain in a null subject language such as Spanish.
Though previous research has shown that sentence repetition (SR) is an informative tool for identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilinguals, little is understood about the skills that underlie children's performance on the task. With a population of 136 school-age Spanish–English bilinguals, the present study explores the contribution of verbal short-term memory, vocabulary, and language exposure on two SR tasks developed in English and Spanish. Results indicate that these skills may differentially underlie SR in typical versus disordered populations. Whereas the strongest predictors of English SR performance for typical bilingual children were expressive vocabulary and language exposure, bilingual children with DLD relied most heavily on verbal short-term memory. ROC curves to determine the classification accuracy of SR were conducted. Classification accuracy was excellent, with area under the curve reaching .92 for the English SR task and .87 for Spanish SR.
Purpose:
Our proof-of-concept study tested the feasibility of virtual testing using child assessments that were originally validated for in-person testing only.
Method:
Ten adult–child dyads were assigned to complete both in-person and virtual tests of language, cognition, and narratives. Child participants fell between the ages of 4 and 8 years; adult participants were speech-language clinicians or researchers with experience in administering child assessments. Half of child participants were Spanish–English bilinguals, and half were monolingual English speakers.
Results:
Results showed similar performance across in-person and virtual modalities on all assessments. Recommendations for adapting, administering, and scoring virtual measures with linguistically diverse children are discussed.
Conclusions:
Although additional research on virtual assessment is needed, our results open opportunities for appropriate remote assessment, particularly for bilingual children, who may not have in-person access to speech-language pathology services.
We explore the classification accuracy of a parent and teacher report measure, the Inventory to Assess Language Knowledge (ITALK), to screen for developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children. Participants included 120 Spanish English bilingual children with typical development (TD) and 19 bilingual children with DLD, ranging in age from 5 to 8 years old. Parents’ and teachers’ reports correlated moderately with each other and significantly predicted children’s performance on language-specific measures of morphosyntax and semantics. Results yielded sensitivity of .90 and specificity of .63 when using a composite of parent and teacher reports in Spanish and English. Examination of structure loadings in follow-up analyses by grade showed that teachers’ report of English and parents’ report of Spanish were the strongest predictors of impairment in kindergarten. In second grade, the strongest predictors were parent and teacher reports in English. Implications for referral and identification are discussed.
This quasi-experimental study was designed to test the impacts of a curriculum supplement, Let's Know! on the quantity and quality of language-focused comprehension instruction in preKindergarten to third grade classrooms. Sixty classrooms (12 per each of pre-K to grade 3) were enrolled in the study, with 40 teachers assigned to implement one of two versions of the experimental Let's Know! curriculum and 20 assigned to a control condition, in which they maintained their typical language-arts curriculum. Classroom observations, 90 minutes in duration, were collected near the end of the first unit's completion, about four to five weeks into the academic year. These observations were coded to examine impacts of Let's Know! instruction on two outcomes: (a) teachers' use of 18 language-focused comprehension supports, and (b) general classroom quality. Study results using quantile regression showed that Let's Know! teachers used a significantly higher number of language-focused comprehension supports during Let's Know! instruction compared to the control teachers during language-arts instruction; the same finding was also true for general classroom quality. Quantile regression results showed the greatest differentiation in instructional quality, when comparing experimental and control teachers, for teachers in the middle of the distribution of general classroom quality. Study findings highlight the value of language-focused curricula for heightening comprehensionspecific supports in pre-K to grade 3 settings.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.