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

The Bilingual Input-Output Survey (BIOS)-Home (Peña et al., 2018) is used to provide speech-language pathologists (SLPs) with an estimate of children's exposure to two languages. The current hour-by-hour approach of the BIOS can be time consuming to administer and calculate. The current study seeks to improve the efficiency of the BIOS-Home by replicating Calandruccio et al.'s (2021) finding that the BIOS can be shortened by time periods around children's routines and extending these findings by preliminarily exploring the relationship of the shortened BIOS with results of a bilingual screener.

The current study includes 1,337 Spanish-English bilingual children from two data sets. Children's ages ranged from 49 to 71 months (M = 60.58, SD = 4.96). BIOS-Home data were collected by trained bilingual research assistants and SLPs who interviewed caregivers on their children's language input and output hour by hour. Principal components analysis (PCA) was conducted using caregiver-reported BIOS-Home data from both data sets to determine the smallest number of time chunks that could be used to measure language exposure. To explore the validity of the shortened BIOS-Home, bivariate correlation analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between children's semantics and morphosyntax scores and the original and shortened versions of the BIOS-Home.

PCAs using the two data sets identified three time periods (morning, afternoon, and late afternoon/evening) for weekday receptive language and three time periods (morning, afternoon, and evening) for weekend receptive language. Language test score correlations comparing the hour-by-hour and the shortened approaches are highly similar, supporting the validity of the shortened approach.

Consolidating the BIOS-Home questionnaire is a viable approach that can save time and elicit valid information about children's bilingual input and output.