Assessing Morphosyntax in Spanish-Speaking Children

Abstract

Accurate assessment of the morpho-syntactic skills of Spanish-speaking children depends on the clinician's understanding of the morpho-syntactic system and on the development of tasks that obligate the use of structures of interest. In this article, the nature and acquisition of the Spanish morpho-syntactic system is outlined. The aspects of the system that are likely to be difficult for children with language impairments and those that are critical to communicative competence are emphasized, as the clinician must take these into account when planning assessment tasks. The analysis of spontaneous language samples and the use of structured probes are discussed as alternatives for assessment. The naturalness and linguistic demands of assessment tasks are also considered because they are critical to understanding children's performance on morpho-syntactic tasks.

Assessment of Bilingual Children for Identification of Language Impairment: Current Findings and Implications for Practice

“…For example, children with LI learning Spanish and other Romance languages may have particular difficulty with clitic markers or with articles (e.g. Bedore, 2001;Bedore & Leonard, 2005;Bortolini et al, 1997;LeNormand et al, 1993), while in English difficulties are in the area of verb tense marking Rice & Wexler, 1996). Tests such as the Spanish Language Assessment Procedures (SLAP, Mattes, 1985) and the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Spanish (CELF-Spanish, Semel et al, 1997) have been based on English.…”

Language sample measures and language ability in Spanish-English bilingual kindergarteners

“…Data on Spanish learning children also demonstrate change over time in MLU (Gutiérrez-Clellen, Restrepo, Bedore, Peña, & Anderson, 2000). In Spanish the growth trajectory in MLU is flatter relative to English increases related to increased sentence length due to added clauses in Spanish can be offset by the speakers ability to drop subjects or other information available contextually (Bedore, 2001; Gutiérrez-Clellen, et al, 2000). …”

Noun Phrase Elaboration in Children’s Spoken Stories

“…However, there is no reason to believe that nonmainstream dialect use would have affected these results. Although articles may be omitted in both AAE and Spanishinfluenced English ( Bedore, 2001;Washington & Craig, 2002), there were other types of determiners, such as demonstratives (e.g., this, those) and pronominal forms (e.g., his, their), produced in the samples. Other pre-noun modifiers and postmodification would not have been affected by dialect.…”