Bilingual Children's Grammatical Productivity From Spontaneous Language Samples in English and Spanish

Much work has been done to characterize the grammatical productivity of English-speaking monolingual children and the English skills of bilingual children. However, less work has been done to characterize productivity of bilingual children in other languages. This study investigates the clinical utility of a Spanish grammatical productivity measure to address the need for linguistically responsive measures in bilingual language assessment.

Spontaneous language samples were collected for 23 typically developing (TD) preschoolers and nine preschoolers with developmental language disorder (DLD). In Spanish, children's productive use of definite articles, indefinite articles, and direct object clitics was calculated to derive group averages. In English, children's productive use of tense and agreement morphemes was examined.

In Spanish and in English, TD children demonstrated higher productivity than children with DLD.

In addition to English productivity, children's Spanish grammatical productivity is a promising clinical tool to be used in the assessment of Spanish-English bilingual children.