What Can English Tell Us? English Tense/Agreement Measures as Tools for Identification of Spanish-English Bilingual...

The aim of this study was to examine the potential clinical use of English-only measures of tense/agreement to identify Spanish-English bilingual children with developmental language disorders (DLDs).

Participants included 129 Spanish-English bilingual children aged 4-7 years; 55 children were classified as having DLD. Language samples were elicited in English through story retell and story generation tasks to calculate tense/agreement composite measures of emerging diversity (tense marker total), productivity (tense/agreement productivity), and accuracy (modified version of the finite verb morphology composite). We investigated whether these measures in English show group-level differences in bilingual children with DLD from peers with typically developing language (TD) and the diagnostic accuracy of these measures while taking into account English vocabulary and age.

The group of children with DLD significantly underperformed the group with TD across all tense/agreement composite measures. When using optimized cutoff scores, tense/agreement measures yielded mixed results for diagnostic accuracy to identify children with DLD as correctly having DLD.

Best practices recommend using converging evidence from both languages when assessing bilingual children. Given that English assessment is often the primary tool available to school-based clinicians, our findings indicate that English-only tense/agreement measures may provide valuable descriptive information about bilingual children's English language development. However, these measures should be interpreted within a comprehensive evaluation of language abilities and should not be used in isolation for diagnostic purposes.

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.31383088.