Understanding Disorder Within Variation: Production of English Grammatical Forms by English Language Learners

Abstract

It is possible to accurately identify LI in English language learners once they use English 40% of the time or more. However, for children with high Spanish experience, more information about development and patterns of impairment is needed to positively identify LI.

“Did I Say Cherry ?” Error Patterns on a Blocked Cyclic Naming Task for Bilingual Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

“…While our findings support the position that a characteristic of DLD is deficient semantic networks, not all children with DLD appear to have deficits in vocabulary knowledge on forcechoice recognition tests (see Gray, Plante, Vance, & Heinrichsen, 1999, for examples with monolingual children). Clinically, grammatical structures may be better indicators of potential DLD, particularly for bilingual children with a range of second language experience (see Bedore, Peña, Anaya, Nieto, Lugo-Neris, & Baron, 2018). While patterns of error production may be easily perceptible for clinicians (i.e., semantic errors), not all error types necessarily point to impaired language (i.e., phonological errors).…”

“…The confirmatory phase began one year later, and children in kindergarten through fifth grade could participate up to three times over three consecutive years. To determine ability status we followed the same procedures as Bedore et al (2018).…”

Production of Spanish Grammatical Forms in U.S. Bilingual Children

“…All conjunctions in this study were elicited through a sentence repetition task. Even though these children may not be using conjunctions, such as "aunque" (although), "antes de" (before), or "cuando" (when) in spontaneous speech (which would lengthen their MLU), they are able to produce them in a sentence repetition task, as these are sentence constructions they have heard before (Bedore et al, 2018). The second most accurate set of morphemes was plural articles and preterite.…”

Evaluating English Morpheme Accuracy, Diversity, and Productivity Measures in Language Samples of Developing Bilinguals

“…Several weaknesses of accuracy measures were identified, suggesting that the diversity and productivity measures may be an important complement to language assessment in bilingual children, particularly for children whose English language skills are emerging. When used appropriately, English language measures may have a valuable place in bilingual language assessment (Bedore et al, 2018;Gillam et al, 2013;Gutiérrez-Clellen et al, 2008), particularly when combined with a parent report and assessment of the native language (e.g., Bedore & Peña, 2008;Gillam, Peña, & Miller, 1999).…”

“…This research was motivated by the need for appropriate measures of English language development for young bilinguals in the United States (Bedore & Peña, 2008;Bedore et al, 2018;Gillam et al, 2013). The present goal was to consider measures of English morpheme use in preschool-age Spanish-English developing bilinguals with typical language and with low language skills.…”