Date of Award
2020
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Honors Thesis
Department
Communication Sciences & Disorders
First Advisor
Sofia Souto
Abstract
The identification of meaningful language measures for bilingual children has important clinical implications in the diagnosis of impairment. Given the shortage of bilingual speech-language pathologists, informative English measures are invaluable. This study extends current research to examine the utility of widely accepted English grammatical measures in bilingual school-aged children with differing levels of English exposure. The language sample analyses implemented have shown repeatedly to discriminate between typical and language impaired monolinguals, and more recently were considered in the assessment of developing bilinguals. Measures were taken from the language samples of thirteen school-aged bilingual Spanish-English speaking children who told a story using a wordless picture book. These thirteen participants were split into groups of high and low proficiency based on English preschool Language Assessment Scales (pre-LAS) scores and age of first exposure to English. There was no significant evidence found to support that these measures correlate with the broad measures of language (mean length of utterance and number of different words) or can differentiate between the two groups of varying proficiency.
Recommended Citation
Raab, Gabrielle, "English morpheme accuracy, diversity, and productivity measures in school-aged bilingual children" (2020). Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection. 524.
https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/ugtheses/524