Improving the Efficiency of the Bilingual Input-Output Survey-Home

Area of Science:

• Child Language Acquisition
• Bilingualism Research
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• The Bilingual Input-Output Survey-Home (BIOS-Home) assesses bilingual children's language exposure.
• The traditional hour-by-hour method is time-consuming for speech-language pathologists (SLPs).
• Previous research suggests shortening the BIOS-Home is feasible.

Purpose of the Study:

• To improve the efficiency of the BIOS-Home by shortening administration time.
• To validate a condensed version of the BIOS-Home by comparing it to the original.
• To explore the relationship between the shortened BIOS-Home and bilingual screener results.

Main Methods:

• Utilized data from 1,337 Spanish-English bilingual children (ages 49-71 months).
• Applied Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to caregiver-reported BIOS-Home data to identify optimal time chunks.
• Conducted bivariate correlation analyses to compare the original and shortened BIOS-Home versions with language test scores.

Main Results:

• PCA identified three key time periods for weekdays and weekends for receptive language assessment.
• Correlations between language test scores and both the hour-by-hour and shortened BIOS-Home versions were highly similar.
• The shortened BIOS-Home demonstrated validity comparable to the original, time-intensive method.

Conclusions:

• Consolidating the BIOS-Home questionnaire into routine time periods is a viable and time-saving approach.
• The shortened BIOS-Home effectively elicits valid information on children's bilingual language input and output.
• This optimized method supports efficient practice for speech-language pathologists working with bilingual children.