Raquel Anderson

The purposes of this article are (a) to discuss issues related to the selection and development of language assessment procedures for children who speak Spanish and English based on spontaneous language samples and (b) to show how available procedures can be applied to research and clinical aims with these children. Sociolinguistic influences in the language performance of Spanish-speaking children, including patterns of language shift, differences in the amount of exposure to each of a bilingual's languages, and contextual effects of different language-learning environments, are discussed. Methodological issues and effects of codeswitching and dialect are examined concerning use of the Developmental Assessment of Spanish Grammar (DASG), mean length of response in words (MLR-w), mean length of terminable unit (MLTU), and mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLU-m). Measures of …

One of the most salient linguistic characteristics of immigrant populations across the world is that in language contact situations, first language (L1) skills will be affected. How these skills are changed in terms of structure and degree depends on a myriad of variables. Latino children living in the United States are not immune to this phenomenon, and practitioners coping with the complexities of assessing and treating children from dual language environments need to understand the phenomenon and how it is manifested in the children’s use of Spanish, which is often their L1. Not understanding language contact phenomena may result in incorrectly interpreting performance, thus increasing the potential for the misdiagnosis of language ability or disability. The purpose of this chapter is to describe Spanish-speaking children’s patterns of use of their L1 as they begin to learn to use their second language (L2), which, in …

The purpose of the present investigation was to obtain preliminary data on the effects of first language (LI) loss on the Spanish of bilingual children, particularly with respect to noun phrase (NP) gender agreement. Two children, bilingual in English and Spanish, were followed longitudinally and their use of gender agreement was examined. Data on incidence and type of NP gender agreement errors were obtained. Results of the investigation suggest that Spanish gender agreement morphology may be vulnerable to language loss. Nevertheless, differences in relative impact of L1 loss on gender agreement varied among the children. In contrast to previous research with Spanish-speaking children who are learning English as a second language and who have language impairment, it appears that gender errors are the result of the language contact situation, and not because of language learning deficits. Possible …

Phonetic and phonological analyses were performed on spontaneous speech samples of six 2–year–old monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish-learning children. The analyses showed a number of patterns of sound usage similar to those found in English-learning children of the same age, as well as children from other linguistic backgrounds. These findings add support to the claim that certain universal patterns exist in phonological development. However, a number of patterns were also observed which seemed to be accounted for by the target language being acquired. Similarities and differences among the individual children are also discussed.

In this paper, preliminary longitudinal data on the effects of first language loss on verb inflection and use by two Spanish-speaking siblings who were in an English-speaking environment were gathered. Both children were followed for approximately two years and were video-recorded while interacting with a familiar Spanish-speaking adult. Spontaneous Spanish speech samples were used to monitor patterns of L1 loss in the children's use of verbal lexemes and inflections. Bybee's (1985,1995) lexical morphology model was followed to predict the course of L1 loss. In particular, the concepts of semantic relevancy and input frequency, and their effects on verbal inflection in a child L1 loss context were examined. Results in general follow the predictions made by Bybee's model. Specifically, less semantically relevant distinctions, such as person/number inflection, appear to be more vulnerable to loss. Frequency of …

Most normative data available for assessing resonance through instrumentation have been collected with English-speaking individuals. The present study aimed at providing initial data on Spanish for use with the nasometer. Mean nasalance scores were obtained from 40 normal Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking females while they read three types of stimuli: (1) sentences containing nasal consonants, (2) a reading passage with both oral and nasal consonants, and (3) a reading passage with oral consonants. Results indicated significant differences In mean nasalance scores across the nasal sentences, as well as the two paragraph stimuli. In addition, a high degree of intersubject variability in the production of the target stimuli was evidenced. Comparisons with previous English normative data with similar reading stimuli are made and possible avenues for further research on the use of the nasometer with Spanish …

I followed a young bilingual Puerto Rican Spanish-English speaking child during a 2-year period (ages 4 years 7 months to 6 years 5 months). Spanish language samples were collected periodically while the child interacted with a familiar adult and analyzed for evidence of grammatical errors and reduction in morphosyntactic complexity. The child's use of various communicative strategies was also assessed. These included code switching and the use of general Spanish reference words (e.g., locatives, demonstrative pronouns) and phrases. Results suggest a progressive reduction of morphological and syntactical complexity in Spanish. The observed errors tended to affect mainly Spanish inflectional morphology (e.g., verb agreement errors, gender agreement errors). The incidence of syntactic errors such as incorrect word order in the production of noun phrases was low. The child also presented a variety of …

Phonological development in first and second languages (L1 and L2 respectively) has not been extensively studied in young children who are acquiring a second language via immersion. This lack of information is unfortunate, as the number of children who are acquiring a second language in this context is growing and such children make up a part of the clinical caseload of many speech‐language pathologists. To address the need for information regarding phonological development of children acquiring a second language in immersion, the present investigation sought to provide longitudinal data on the development of both L1 and L2 phonologies. Five preschoolers who were acquiring English as a L2 and who spoke different L1s participated in the study. A picture identification task was used to assess productive phonological skills in L1 and English. Analyses included a description of the children's phonetic …

The present investigation sought to evaluate patterns of article use in a group of monolingual Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). In particular, because of conflicting results reported in previous studies, it was of interest to discern specific types of nontarget responses and how these corresponded to what has been reported in other Spanish-speaking children with SLI. Eleven children with SLI and 11 age-matched peers participated in the study. Three different spontaneous speech samples were gathered from each child. In addition, an experimental task that assessed the children's use of articles with a variety of nouns was also administered to the children. The results of the study for both spontaneous speech and experimental data indicated that the children with SLI performed significantly poorer in their use of Spanish articles than their age-matched peers. Most of the nontarget …

A<u>s the culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) population</u> of <u>the United States continues to increase dramatically, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) face the challenge how best to serve children whose primary language is not English. One way</u> of <u>overcoming the bilingual communication barrier is for bilingual children to alternate their two languages (i.e., code switching and code mixing). Frequently, SLPs have limited understanding</u> of <u>the functions and patterns of language alternation in bilingual children. Language alternation is a normal, common, and</u> important aspect of bilingualism. <u>This</u> investigation <u> aims</u> to answer several basic questions regarding normal code mixing behaviors in a young bilingual child, namely, (a) What syntactic elements are mixed most frequently in conversational discourse in a young bilingual child? and (b) What information can be applied to a diagnostic or therapeutic situation …

The present investigation compared two testing instruments for evaluating the grammatical skills of Spanish-speaking preschool children. The Structured Photographic Expressive Language Test-Preschool (SPELT-P, Werner &amp; Kresheck, 1989) was compared to a structured task activity developed by the investigator. Both procedures targeted the same grammatical forms. Results indicated that the structured task procedure was more effective in evaluating children’s productive knowledge of the grammatical forms tested. Children performed significantly better in this task. Procedural differences across the testing instruments were responsible for the observed differences. Issues concerning the effect of task on performance are discussed as they relate to the assessment of the culturally and linguistically diverse child.

Data on personal pronoun development in Spanish-speaking children was obtained in this study. Forty monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 3;11 participated in the investigation. Two tasks were designed to obligate production of nominative and object pronouns in both reflexive and non-reflexive forms. Productive use and error analysis data were obtained and compared to previous data on pronoun development in English. By contrast with the order of productive use of grammatical case distinctions reported in the literature for English-speaking children, the children in the present study demonstrated a pattern in which nominative pronoun use preceded object case use. Implications of these findings for developmental theories that have been presented to explain pronoun development are discussed.

Bilingual individuals frequently switch between languages and mix elements of the two languages they speak. In fact, the ability to switch and mix between languages is a trademark of proficient bilinguals (see Centeno, ch. 3, this volume). The study of language switching (LS) and language mixing (LM) in non-brain-damaged and brain-damaged populations has been the focus of interest in a wide variety of disciplines. One of the reasons for this interest, particularly in linguistics, speechlanguage pathology, and psychology, is that the study of LM and LS provides information regarding the possible ways two or more languages are represented and processed in the mind of bilingual speakers. Brain damage can impair the mechanisms that allow the appropriate use of LM and LS. Curiously, it is rare that appropriate language choice breaks down in aphasia that is due to frank lesions; rather, one sometimes sees problems with language selection in the aphasia resulting from Alzheimer’s dementia (Obler et al., 1995). Nonetheless, there are circumstances in which non-Alzheimer’s aphasic bilinguals may show inappropriate mixing of languages, such as during episodes of anomia (word-finding limitations) in which the aphasic bilingual may use the wrong language when searching for the target lexical item (Obler et al., 1995). Given that more than half of the world is multilingual (Fabbro, 2001), bilingual and polyglot aphasia can be considered frequent conditions. Hence, studying impaired LS profiles constitutes an important aspect in bilingual aphasiology. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss LM and LS in the context of aphasia and its …

Cross‐linguistic research on SLI has suggested that how the disorder is manifested depends on the ambient language. For example, research on Italian indicates that SLI children do not present difficulties with verb inflection, when compared with MLUmatched peers. This pattern contrasts with what has been reported for Englishspeaking children. The present investigation sought to examine SLI children's use of inflectional morphology through a language teaching task similar to that used by Connell (1987) and Connell and Stone (1992). To address cross‐linguistic differences, children were speakers of a language similar to Italian in its verb agreement paradigm. Sixteen Puerto Rican Spanish‐speaking with SLI and 16 age‐matched controls were taught a subject‐verb agreement suffix that established the subject's gender. Half the children in each group were taught the new form via imitation. The rest of the …