Improving Equitable and Culturally Sensitive Practices for Bahamian Creole English Speakers: Identifying Children's...

Morphosyntactic features of Bahamian Creole English (BCE), a natural language in the Bahamas, have been evaluated in adult language; however, we lack information on typical BCE morphosyntactic development in young children. This study evaluated typical morpheme production patterns across three different language sample tasks for BCE-speaking preschool-age children.

Participants included 30 Bahamian children ages 3-5 years who were reported to be typically developing per parent report. Children's productions of BCE morphemes across preschool age groups (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) were evaluated using three different language sampling tasks: a 10-min play-based conversation, a story retell using a wordless picture book, and a story tell using the School-Age Language Assessment Measures cards. All data were collected in BCE and analyzed using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts.

Age group was not significantly related to the frequencies of BCE morpheme production. However, the type of language sample task administered mattered, as the number of morphemes children produced significantly differed by task type. Specifically, children produced significantly more BCE morphemes during the conversational language sample compared to the story tell and story retell tasks.

Language sampling tasks are culturally sensitive measures for evaluating language development. For preschool-age children, conversational language samples may provide an optimal language sample context for children to produce morphosyntactic constructions in their natural language. Future research should evaluate the utility of conversational language samples for identifying at-risk status for developmental language disorder in BCE-speaking preschool children.