Sentence Diversity in Spanish-English Bilingual Toddlers

There remain few available tools to assess language development in Spanish-English dual language learner (DLL) toddlers in the United States. Of interest is the development of early sentences as children move from producing single words to producing multiword utterances. This study is the first to extend sentence diversity to the context of Spanish-English DLLs by describing development from 24 to 30 months of age in children with and without language delays (LDs).

Spontaneous language samples were collected from Spanish-dominant DLL children and their mothers as they were observed during a free-play interaction. Existing sentence diversity protocols were adapted for the DLL context to describe children's flexibility in combining subjects and verbs to form utterances in Spanish and English.

Children maintained an accurate separation in their grammars for subject-verb combinations in Spanish versus English. There was an overwhelming preference for Spanish subject-verb combinations with null subjects. The emergence of sentence diversity distinguished children with and without early LD unlike the emergence of word combinations.

Consistent with prior research, findings showed that DLLs did not confuse grammatical structures across languages. Instead, they showed a differential pattern of results in each language, such that the strongest grammatical skills were evinced first in the dominant language. Sentence diversity shows promise for assessment and progress monitoring in Spanish-English DLLs in the United States.