Conceptual Scoring and Classification Accuracy of Vocabulary Testing in Bilingual Children

Abstract

Downloaded From: http://lshss.pubs.asha.org/ by a ReadCube User on 01/10/2018 Terms of Use: http://pubs.asha.org/ss/rights_and_permissions.aspx specificity, however, we have no reason to expect high classification accuracy, even if conceptual scoring is used. Thus, we explore the diagnostic accuracy of conceptual vocabulary scoring to determine if using conceptual scoring with single-word vocabulary tests increased their sensitivity so they might contribute to the identification of SLI in bilingual children. Vocabulary Difficulties in Children With SLILexical acquisition deficits are a commonly noted characteristic of SLI in research and clinical practice (Gray, 2004(Gray, , 2005(Gray, , 2006Horohov & Oetting, 2004;Kiernan & Gray, 1998;Nash & Donaldson, 2005;Rice, Oetting, Marquis, Bode, & Pae, 1994;Weismer & Hesketh, 1998). Compared with peers with typically developing (TD) language skills, children with SLI exhibit slower vocabulary growth (Rescorla, Roberts, & Dahlsgaard, 1997), difficulty learning new words (Alt, Plante, & Creusere, 2004;Alt & Suddarth, 2012), and limited expressive vocabulary (Gray & Brinkley, 2011). Experimental studies comparing children with SLI and TD language skills document significant difficulties in word learning. For example, Weismer and Hesketh (1998) found that children with SLI require more exposures to a word to comprehend or produce it than their TD peers. In both fast mapping and quick incidental learning tasks, children with SLI learn fewer novel words (Alt, 2011;Alt et al., 2004;Gray, 2004Gray, , 2006Oetting, Rice, & Swank, 1995;Rice, Cleave, & Oetting, 2000;Rice et al., 1994). They also demonstrate weaknesses in word retrieval (Gray, 2004;Gray & Brinkley, 2011;Kambanaros et al., 2015;McGregor, Newman, Reilly, & Capone, 2002), naming errors, and word approximation difficulties (Dollaghan, 1998;Sheng & McGregor, 2010;Spaulding, 2010).Due to these documented deficits in word learning and perhaps to their ease of administration and scoring, vocabulary tests are widely used by clinicians to determine whether a child's language skills require further evaluation (Campbell, Bell, & Keith, 2001), as a method of identifying SLI in children for research studies (Rice et al., 1990;Rice, Buhr, & Oetting, 1992;Rice et al., 1994), or to document vocabulary growth (Rowe, Raudenbush, & Goldin-Meadow, 2012). While numerous comprehensive language batteries are commercially available to clinicians, vocabulary tests are frequently used as a component of diagnostic evaluations of children to determine if a child meets the criteria for SLI (Betz et al., 2013), even though test manuals may not recommend them for this purpose (Brownell, 2000a). Vocabulary Tests as Indicators of SLITo use vocabulary test scores for screening or identification purposes, clinicians must first be confident that the assessment has evidence of validity and reliability (McCauley & Swisher, 1984). Plante and Vance (1994) suggested that language tests that discriminate between children with and without SLI with an accuracy...

The joint effects of bilingualism, DLD and item frequency on children's lexical‐retrieval performance

“…For example, in a recent study, 247 English-Spanish bilingual children aged5-11 years, with DLD (BiDLD) or with typical language development (BiTLD) were compared on a naming task in both languages (Anaya et al 2018). The results revealed that BiDLD performed lower than BiTLD in naming accuracy, especially when responses from both languages were considered.…”

“…The effect of DLD within the population of bilingual children has been examined in the lexical domain using various measures, including naming (Anaya et al 2018, Kambanaros et al 2015, Khoury Aouad Saliby et al 2017, word associations (Holmström et al 2016) and lexical diversity measures in narrative production (Altman et al 2016). Across these production tasks, the trigger for target selection among the meaning-related alternatives differ (Gollan et al 2011).…”

“…The effect of DLD within the population of bilingual children has been examined in the lexical domain using various measures, including naming (Anaya et al . , Kambanaros et al . , Khoury Aouad Saliby et al .…”

“…One approach examines the effect of DLD within the bilingual population. Studies comparing bilingual children with typical language development (BiTLD) and BiDLD showed that BiDLD perform quantitatively and qualitatively worse than BiTLD across tasks that explored lexical development (Anaya et al 2018, Holmström et al 2016) and other language domains (for an overview, see Armon-Lotem et al 2015).…”

Effects of Specific Language Impairment on a Contrastive Dialect Structure: The Case of Infinitival TO Across Various Nonmainstream Dialects of English

“…We included these children because they had not been identified by their schools as presenting a low nonverbal IQ, and the children's PTONI scores did not correlate with their rates of zero-marked infinitival TO (r ≤ .13). Also, although many studies of SLI use a −1 SD cut score for nonverbal IQ, some use a −1.3, −1.5, or −2.0 SD cut score (e.g., Anaya, Peña, & Bedore, 2017;Desmottes, Meulemans, Patinec, & Maillart, 2017;Kapa, Plante, & Doubleday, 2017;Montgomery, Gillam, Evans, & Sergeev, 2017;Sanjeevan & Mainela-Arnold, 2017;Van Horne, Fey, & Curran, 2017). Finally, the practice of cognitive referencing to select children for studies of SLI has been discussed and questioned in various publications (see Ebbles, 2014;Leonard, 2014;Rice, 2016).…”