Presenter: Tess Owens, David O. McKay School of Education, Communication Disorders
Authors: Tess Owens, Whitney Ahlstrom, Casey Taliancich-Klinger, Connie Summers
Faculty Advisor: Connie Summers, McKay School of Education, Communication Disorders
Institution: Brigham Young University
Bilingual children with developmental language disorders are often misdiagnosed (Bedore & Peña, 2008). Our study was part of a larger project examining the narratives of monolingual and bilingual children across two years. The purpose of the current preliminary analysis was to examine grammaticality in the narratives of bilingual participants in the first year of the project and to explore the effects of a language enrichment program. Fourteen bilingual children participated in the current study, ranging in age from 4;0 to 7;2. Based on passing or non-passing scores on a language screening test (Peña et al., 2008; Zimmerman et al., 2011) and completion of Spanish and English narrative tells and retells using wordless picture books (Mayer, 1974), the participants were divided into two groups; 4 non-risk children and 5 at-risk children. The at-risk group participated in a 6-week language enrichment program and then all participants were reassessed with the narrative tells and retells. Each pre- and post-test narrative was transcribed and then coded as grammatical, ungrammatical, or code-switched, after which the total number of grammatical utterances were divided by the total number of utterances to obtain the Percent Grammatical Utterances (PGU). Independent t-tests revealed no significant differences between non-risk and at-risk groups for PGU in English or Spanish (p > .05). Paired t-tests revealed a significantly higher Spanish PGU than in English at pre-test (p < .05), but there was no difference at post-testing. Overall, children made more language gains in English than in Spanish but the short-term language enrichment did not significantly affect PGU scores. Results will be discussed in terms of previous studies using PGU in bilingual children (Smith et al., 2020). Clinical implications and recommendation for use of a grammaticality will also be presented.