Word Definition Skills in Spanish-Speaking Children with Language Impairment

Abstract

Recent research has shown that children's formal definition skills correlate with school achievement. However, performance on word definition tasks may also relate to children's previous educational and language experiences. Available data are based mostly on monolingual English-speaking children and are not appropriate to identify the needs of children from other language or cultural backgrounds. This study compared the word definition skills of Spanish-speaking children with and without language impairment using a qualitative analysis. The results revealed great individual differences in the use of formal definitions within groups and specific language needs in the children with language impairment. Rather than focusing solely on children's lexical knowledge, which may be sensitive to differences in cultural and educational experience, clinicians should focus on assessing the communicative aspects of the task.

Semantic Deficits in Spanish–English Bilingual Children With Language Impairment

“…The fact that we statistically controlled for group differences in lexical diversity suggests that this deficit extends beyond the children’s general delays in vocabulary size and reflects extraordinary difficulties in building semantic depth. These results are consistent with the existing literature on semantic deficits in monolingual children with LI (Gray, 2004; McGregor et al, 2002; Munro, 2007; Nash & Donaldson, 2005; Sheng & McGregor, 2010a, 2010b) as well as the emerging literature on bilingual children with LI (Gutierrez-Clellen & DeCurtis, 1999; Peña et al, 2001). From a spreading activation perspective, these findings indicate that the children with LI have fewer links in their semantic networks both within and across languages relative to their TD peers.…”

“…Gutiérrez-Clellen and DeCurtis (1999) investigated the quality of definitions produced by Spanish-English bilingual children with and without LI. The children with LI used non-specific vocabulary, provided infrequent elaborations, and were unable to account for multiple and/or colloquial word meanings (e.g.…”

Verbal Working Memory in Bilingual Children

“…The Spanish CLPT was constructed to have the same number of sentences as the English CLPT. They were not direct translations from the English CLPT, and as with the English CLPT, they were constructed to contain concrete nouns and verbs comprehensible to young school-age children based on the more than 25 years of experience of the first author as a Spanish-speaking speech-language pathologist working with children of Argentine, Spanish, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Central American backgrounds; her previous research with Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican and Mexican American children (e.g., Gutiérrez-Clellen, 1998); and her expertise in the area of cross-cultural and dialectal differences in child language development (e.g., Gutiérrez-Clellen & DeCurtis, 1999;Gutiérrez-Clellen & Quinn, 1993). Many of the vocabulary words are included in Spanish-language inventories (e.g., Jackson-Maldonado, Thal, Marchman, Bates, & Gutiérrez-Clellen, 1993) and in tests normed on Spanish speakers, such as the Preschool Language Scale-3, Spanish Edition (Zimmerman, Steiner, & Pond, 1993).…”

‘To define means to say what you know about things’: the development of definitional skills as metalinguistic acquisition

“…Secondly, the acquisition of reading and writing leads to a more detached and reflective attitude towards language as well as more formal and exhaustive ways of defining words (Sinclair, 1986). In fact, during the process of acquiring literacy, children are frequently asked to manipulate word meaning and to use their lexical knowledge to provide definitions for the words they read (Gutierrez-Clellen & De Curtis, 1999).…”