The purpose of this study is twofold: (a) to examine whether English finite morphology has the potential to differentiate children with and without language impairment (LI) from Spanish-speaking backgrounds and different levels of English proficiency in comparison to Hispanic English speakers and (b) to investigate the extent to which children who are bilingual exhibit differences in their grammatical performance because of cross-linguistic influence from their first language. Seventy-one children between the ages of 4 years, 5 months and 6 years, 5 months were distributed into the following five groups: English as a first language (EL1) speakers with typical language development (TLD), EL1 speakers with LI, Spanish-English bilinguals with TLD, Spanish-English bilinguals with LI, and English as a second language (EL2) learners with TLD were compared on regular verb finiteness and nominative subject use using spontaneous narrative samples. The EL1 children with LI had significantly lower verb accuracy rates than the EL1 controls with TLD. Verb finiteness marking was also a significant discriminator for the bilinguals with LI. There was no evidence of cross-linguistic influence, however. The analysis indicated no significant differences between EL1 and bilingual children on subject or verb use. The EL2 group only presented difficulties with finite verb use. The typological differences between English and Spanish for overt subject use did not seem to affect the performance of either typical or atypical bilingual learners. The findings underscore the need for addressing language dominance in future bilingual studies.

Purpose-The purpose of this study was to evaluate the discriminant accuracy of a grammatical measure for the identification of language impairment in Latino Spanish-speaking children. The authors hypothesized that if exposure to and use of English as a second language have an effect on the first language, bilingual children might exhibit lower rates of grammatical accuracy than their peers and be more likely to be misclassified.Method-Eighty children with typical language development and 80 with language impairment were sampled from 4 different geographical regions and compared using linear discriminant function analysis.Results-Results indicated fair-to-good sensitivity from 4;0 to 5;1 years, good sensitivity from 5;2 to 5;11 years, and poor sensitivity above age 6 years. The discriminant functions derived from the exploratory studies were able to predict group membership in confirmatory analyses with fairto-excellent sensitivity up to age 6 years. Children who were bilingual did not show lower scores and were not more likely to be misclassified compared with their Spanish-only peers.Conclusions-The measure seems to be appropriate for identifying language impairment in either Spanish-dominant or Spanish-only speakers between 4 and 6 years of age. However, for older children, supplemental testing is necessary. Keywordschildren; Spanish-speaking; discriminant accuracy Accurate identification of language impairment in Spanish-speaking children who are learning English as a second language is critical for the design of appropriate treatments and for the prevention of academic delays later in school. For tests to have adequate classification, they should demonstrate high sensitivity (i.e., the proportion of true positives correctly identified by the test) and high specificity (i.e., the proportion of true negatives correctly identified by the test). Plante and Vance (1994) indicated that a sensitivity and specificity of 80% is considered fair and above 90% is considered good. However, it is difficult to find measures that identify language disorders with accuracies above 90%, even NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript in monolingual English speakers. Research in this area is limited, and most tests lack acceptable levels of diagnostic accuracy because of the language areas assessed, the tasks used, and the procedures utilized to sample participants in the development of test norms.Attempts to adapt standardized English tests have not been successful. Restrepo and Silverman (2001), for example, found that the use of a Spanish adaptation of the Preschool Language Scale-3 (Zimmerman, Steiner, & Pond, 1993) with a group of Spanish-speaking children yielded scores below one standard deviation from the mean in the receptive and expressive language scales. They concluded that the use of such a test would lead to overidentification of typically developing children as having language impairment. In addition, item progression in the test did not demonstrate a developmental trend, a...

The purpose of this study was to examine within and across language relationships between lexical and grammatical domains by focusing on measures of lexical diversity and grammatical complexity in Spanish and English. One hundred and ninety-six preschool and school-aged Latino children with different levels of English and Spanish proficiencies and different language abilities produced narratives in Spanish, English, or both. Analyses revealed strong associations between lexical (number of different words and number of different verbs) and grammatical measures (mean length of utterances in words and use of ditransitive predicates), supporting the domain interdependence hypothesis within a language. Cross-linguistic comparisons indicate a greater diversity of verbs and ditransitive predicates in Spanish compared to English for this population. In the language samples of children who produced narratives in the two languages, there was no relationship between the two domains across languages. The lack of cross-language correlations may be related to other variables influencing lexical and semantic development in bilingual learners. Methodological issues to be considered in future studies with bilingual speakers are discussed.