Morphological Errors in Spanish-Speaking Bilingual Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorders

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Developmental Language Disorders (DLD) present diagnostic challenges, particularly in bilingual populations.
• Identifying reliable markers in Spanish is crucial for accurate DLD assessment in Spanish-English bilingual children.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify morphological markers with high diagnostic accuracy for DLD in Spanish-English bilingual children.
• To evaluate the predictive power of specific Spanish grammatical structures for DLD identification.

Main Methods:

• A production task in Spanish was used to elicit nominal and verbal morphology in 66 bilingual children (ages 4-7), with and without DLD.
• Logistic regression analysis identified grammatical structures that best predicted group membership.

Main Results:

• Children with DLD differed significantly in their production of articles, clitics, adjectives, verbs, and subjunctive mood.
• Clitics, verbs, and subjunctive mood showed adequate diagnostic accuracy individually.
• A combination of verb and subjunctive mood accuracy achieved 85% sensitivity and 91% specificity.

Conclusions:

• Verbal morphology, specifically verb and subjunctive mood production, are significant grammatical markers for DLD in Spanish-English bilingual children.
• These findings support the inclusion of verbal morphology in DLD diagnostic protocols for this population.