Phonological Measures for Bilingual Spanish-English–Speaking Preschoolers: The Language Combination Effect

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Leah Fabiano-Smith ◽  
Chelsea Privette ◽  
Lingling An
Keyword(s):  
Diagnostic Accuracy ◽  
Speech Sound ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Speech Sound Disorders ◽  
Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Spanish Phonology ◽  
The Individual

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine the diagnostic accuracy of traditional measures of phonological ability developed for monolingual English-speaking children with their bilingual peers in both English and Spanish. We predicted that a composite measure, derived from a combination of English and Spanish phonological measures, would result in higher diagnostic accuracy than examining the individual phonological measures of bilingual children separately by language. Method Sixty-six children, ages 3;3–6;3 (years;months), participated in this study: 29 typically developing bilingual Spanish-English–speaking children ( x = 5;3), five bilingual Spanish-English–speaking children with speech sound disorders ( x = 4;6), 26 typically developing monolingual English-speaking children ( x = 4;8), and six monolingual English-speaking children with speech sound disorders ( x = 4;9). Children were recorded producing single words using the Assessments of English and Spanish Phonology, and productions were phonetically transcribed and analyzed using the Logical International Phonetics Program. Overall consonants correct–revised; accuracy of early-, middle-, and late-developing sounds; and percent occurrence of phonological error patterns in both English and Spanish were calculated. Receiver operating characteristic curves and support vector machine models were applied to observe diagnostic accuracy, separately and combined, for each speaker group and each language. Results Findings indicated the combination of measures improved diagnostic accuracy within both the English and Spanish of bilingual children and significantly increased accuracy when measures from both languages of bilingual children were combined. Combining measures for the productions of monolingual English-speaking children did not increase diagnostic accuracy. Conclusion To prevent misdiagnosis of speech sound disorders in bilingual preschoolers, the composite phonological abilities of bilingual children need to be assessed across both gross and discrete measures of phonological ability. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16632604

scholarly journals Diagnostic Accuracy of Traditional Measures of Phonological Ability for Bilingual Preschoolers and Kindergarteners

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Fabiano-Smith ◽  
Katherine Hoffman
Keyword(s):  
Diagnostic Accuracy ◽  
Speech Sound ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Speech Sound Disorders ◽  
Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves ◽  
Phonological Disorders ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Good Diagnostic Accuracy

Purpose Bilingual children whose phonological skills are evaluated using measures designed for monolingual English speakers are at risk for misdiagnosis of speech sound disorders (De Lamo White & Jin, 2011). Method Forty-four children participated in this study: 15 typically developing monolingual English speakers, 7 monolingual English speakers with phonological disorders, 14 typically developing bilingual Spanish–English speakers, and 8 bilingual children with phonological disorders. Children's single-word speech productions were examined on Percentage Consonants Correct–Revised (Shriberg, Austin, Lewis, McSweeny, & Wilson, 1997a) and accuracy of early-, middle-, and late-developing sounds (Shriberg, 1993) in English. Consonant accuracy in English was compared between monolinguals and bilinguals with and without speech sound disorders. Logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic curves were used to observe diagnostic accuracy of the measures examined. Results Percentage Consonants Correct–Revised was found to be a good indicator of phonological ability in both monolingual and bilingual English-speaking children at the age of 5;0. No significant differences were found between language groups on any of the measures examined. Conclusions Our results suggest that traditional measures of phonological ability for monolinguals could provide good diagnostic accuracy for bilingual children at the age of 5;0 years. These findings are preliminary, and children younger than 5;0 years should be examined for risk of misdiagnosis.

scholarly journals Identifying Bilingual Children at Risk for Language Impairment: The Implication of Children’s Response Speed in Narrative Contexts

Children ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Pui Fong Kan ◽  
Anna Miller ◽  
Sierra Still
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Response Speed ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves ◽  
Adult Participants ◽  
Story Retell ◽  
English Speaking

The purpose of the study was to examine whether monolingual adults can identify the bilingual children with LI on the basis of children’s response speed to the examiner. Participants were 37 monolingual English-speaking young adults. Stimuli were 48 audio clips from six sequential bilingual children (48 months) who were predominately exposed to Cantonese (L1) at home from birth and started to learn English (L2) in preschool settings. The audio clips for each child were selected from an interactive story-retell task in both Cantonese and English. Three of the children were typically developing, and three were identified as having a language impairment. The monolingual adult participants were asked to judge children’s response times for each clip. Interrater reliability was high (Kalpha = 0.82 for L1; Kalpha = 0.75 for L2). Logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic curves were used to examine the diagnostic accuracy of the task. Results showed that monolingual participants were able to identify bilingual children with LI based on children’s response speed. Sensitivity and specificity were higher in Cantonese conditions compared to English conditions. The results added to the literature that children’s response speed can potentially be used, along with other measures, to identify bilingual children who are at risk for language impairment.

Measuring Word Learning Ability in Sequential Bilingual Children

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pui Fong Kan
Keyword(s):  
Word Learning ◽  
Learning Ability ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Word Knowledge ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Learning Skills ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Novel Word Learning ◽  
L1 And L2

Abstract The purpose of this article is to look at the word learning skills in sequential bilingual children—children who learn two languages (L1 and L2) at different times in their childhood. Learning a new word is a process of learning a word form and relating this form to a concept. For bilingual children, each concept might need to map onto two word forms (in L1 and in L2). In case studies, I present 3 typically developing Hmong-English bilingual preschoolers' word learning skills in Hmong (L1) and in English (L2) during an 8-week period (4 weeks for each language). The results showed gains in novel-word knowledge in L1 and in L2 when the amount of input is equal for both languages. The individual differences in novel word learning are discussed.

After Dismissal: Examining the Language, Literacy, and Cognitive Skills of Children With Remediated Speech Sound Disorders

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Farquharson
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Speech Production ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Speech Sound ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Speech Sound Disorders ◽  
Academic Difficulties ◽  
The Public ◽  
Age Appropriate ◽  
Language Literacy

Speech sound disorders are a complex and often persistent disorder in young children. For many children, therapy results in successful remediation of the errored productions as well as age-appropriate literacy and academic progress. However, for some children, while they may attain age-appropriate speech production skills, they later have academic difficulties. For SLPs in the public schools, these children present as challenging in terms of both continuing treatment as well as in terms of caseload management. What happens after dismissal? Have these children truly acquired adequate speech production skills? Do they have lingering language, literacy, and cognitive deficits? The purpose of this article is to describe the language, literacy, and cognitive features of a small group of children with remediated speech sound disorders compared to their typically developing peers.

English Past Tense Use in Bilingual Children With Language Impairment

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 313-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy F. Jacobson ◽  
Richard G. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Language Differences ◽  
Error Patterns ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Irregular Verbs ◽  
Verb Categories

Grammatical measures that distinguish language differences from language disorders in bilingual children are scarce. This study examined English past tense morphology in sequential bilingual Spanish/English-speaking children, age 7;0–9;0 (years;months). Twelve bilingual children with language impairment (LI) or history of LI and 15 typically developing (TD) bilingual children participated. Thirty-six instances of the past tense including regular, irregular, and novel verbs were examined using an elicited production task. By examining English past tense morphology in sequential bilinguals, we uncovered similarities and differences in the error patterns of TD children and children with LI. The groups differed in the overall accuracy of past tense use according to verb type, as well as the characteristic error patterns. Children with LI performed lower than their TD peers on all verb categories, with an interaction between verb type and group. TD children were better at producing regular verbs and exhibited more productive errors (e.g., overregularization). Conversely, children with LI performed relatively better on irregular verbs and poorest on novel verbs, and they exhibited more nonproductive errors (e.g., bare stem verbs). The results have important clinical implications for the assessment of morphological productivity in Spanish-speaking children who are learning English sequentially.

scholarly journals The case for morphophonological intervention: Evidence from a Greek-speaking child with speech difficulties

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleftheria Geronikou ◽  
Maggie Vance ◽  
Bill Wells ◽  
Jenny Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Speech Sound ◽  
Single Subject ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Speech Sound Disorders ◽  
Post Intervention ◽  
Assessment Scores ◽  
Single Subject Research ◽  
Language Difficulties ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
And Control

Intervention with children with speech and language difficulties has been proven beneficial compared with no treatment yet, knowing what type of intervention to provide remains a challenge. Studies of English-speaking children indicate that intervention targeting the production of morphological targets may have a positive effect on phonological aspects and vice versa. However, studies have not reported on generalization effects to untreated morphemes and little is yet known about morphological intervention in the context of a highly inflected language. The purpose of the current intervention case study was to investigate the effect of intervention in relation to phonological and morphological targets in Greek, a language characterized by complex inflectional morphology. A single subject research design was used with pre- and post-intervention assessment carried out. The participant was a four-year-old Greek-speaking boy with speech difficulties. The production of /s/, a phoneme used in multiple phonological and morphological contexts was targeted with alternating focus of intervention between phonological and morphological targets. Assessment took place at two levels: macro-assessment to monitor broad changes in speech; micro-assessment to measure therapy-specific changes in the production of treated targets and generalization to untreated targets and control items. There were four phases of intervention with a total of 24 hours of therapy. Significant improvement in performance accuracy was found between assessment scores immediately pre- and post-intervention. Intervention targeting the production of a phoneme in the word stem was not sufficient to accomplish the accurate production of morphemes requiring the same phoneme; intervention directly targeting morphemes was successful. Within-domain generalization was observed in both domains. Improved naming accuracy was observed post-intervention that was maintained at follow-up. The present study supports the case for morphophonological intervention. Morphological elements should be addressed in a comprehensive intervention for speech sound disorders.

Icelandic Children's Acquisition of Consonants and Consonant Clusters

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Thora Másdóttir ◽  
Sharynne McLeod ◽  
Kathryn Crowe
Keyword(s):  
First Language ◽  
Speech Sound ◽  
Clinical Importance ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Consonant Clusters ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Consonant Cluster ◽  
Speech Sound Disorders ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Purpose This study investigated Icelandic-speaking children's acquisition of singleton consonants and consonant clusters. Method Participants were 437 typically developing children aged 2;6–7;11 (years;months) acquiring Icelandic as their first language. Single-word speech samples of the 47 single consonants and 45 consonant clusters were collected using Málhljóðapróf ÞM (ÞM's Test of Speech Sound Disorders). Results Percentage of consonants correct for children aged 2;6–2;11 was 73.12 ( SD = 13.33) and increased to 98.55 ( SD = 3.24) for children aged 7;0–7;11. Overall, singleton consonants were more likely to be accurate than consonant clusters. The earliest consonants to be acquired were /m, n, p, t, j, h/ in word-initial position and /f, l/ within words. The last consonants to be acquired were /x, r, r̥, s, θ, n̥/, and consonant clusters in word-initial /sv-, stl-, str-, skr-, θr-/, within-word /-ðr-, -tl-/, and word-final /-kl̥, -xt/ contexts. Within-word phonemes were more often accurate than those in word-initial position, with word-final position the least accurate. Accuracy of production was significantly related to increasing age, but not sex. Conclusions This is the first comprehensive study of consonants and consonant cluster acquisition by typically developing Icelandic-speaking children. The findings align with trends for other Germanic languages; however, there are notable language-specific differences of clinical importance.

Entropy as a measure of mixedupness of realizations in child speech

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Babatsouli ◽  
David Ingram ◽  
Dimitrios A. Sotiropoulos
Keyword(s):  
Linear Dependence ◽  
Speech Sound ◽  
The Other ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Speech Sound Disorders ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Child Speech ◽  
Mean Length Of Utterance ◽  
Children's Speech

AbstractTypical morpho-phonological measures of children’s speech realizations used in the literature depend linearly on their components. Examples are the proportion of consonants correct, the mean length of utterance and the phonological mean length of utterance. Because of their linear dependence on their components, these measures change in proportion to their component changes between speech realizations. However, there are instances in which variable speech realizations need to be differentiated better. Therefore, a measure which is more sensitive to its components than linear measures is needed. Here, entropy is proposed as such a measure. The sensitivity of entropy is compared analytically to that of linear measures, deriving ranges in component values inside which entropy is guaranteed to be more sensitive than the linear measures. The analysis is complemented by computing the entropy in two children’s English speech for different categories of word complexity and comparing its sensitivity to that of linear measures. One of the children is a bilingual typically developing child at age 3;0 and the other child is a monolingual child with speech sound disorders at age 5;11. The analysis and applications demonstrate the usefulness of the measure for evaluating speech realizations and its relative advantages over linear measures.

Lexical decision task for taxonomic and thematic categorization in typically developing Kannada-English-speaking bilingual children

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shilpa Nanjappa ◽  
Sandra Sebastian ◽  
M.S. Deepa
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Lexical Decision Task ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Taxonomic Relation ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Female Children ◽  
English Speaking

AbstractThe present study investigated the association between the taxonomic, thematic and combined (taxonomic-thematic) conditions during the lexical decision task in Kannada-English speaking bilingual children. Further, the study explored the nature of categorization skills in typically developing Kannada-English speaking bilingual children with respect to the taxonomy and thematic aspects across gender.Considered for the study were 20 preschool children including ten boys and ten girls in the age range of 4–5 years. A total of 50 pictures, including ten target, ten taxonomically related, ten thematically related and 20 distracters were taken from an internet source. Three tasks were introduced to examine the association of the pictures based on taxonomic, thematic and combined conditions. For the first and second task (considered as Experiment I), the children were expected to relate pictures based on taxonomic relationship followed by thematic relationship in the second task. For the final task (Experiment II), both relationships (taxonomic and thematic) were given for each target picture, and the children were expected to relate it with either one of them. Responses were scored and statistically analyzed.There was a significant difference in the performances between male and female children for the taxonomic condition but not for the other two tasks (i.e. thematic and combined conditions). The comparison across three conditions revealed that the performance of those children varied between the conditions. Further, on pair-wise comparison, there was a significant difference for both combined-thematic and combined-taxonomic conditions but not for taxonomic and thematic conditions.The study supports the phenomenon of “thematic to taxonomic shift”, which is found to be emerging in pre-school children. This occurs differently among male and female children. The preferences of thematic relation as opposed to taxonomic relation is highlighted in the present study.

Comparing the Informativeness of Single-Word Samples and Connected Speech Samples in Assessing Speech Sound Disorders

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Li-Li Yeh ◽  
Chia-Chi Liu
Keyword(s):  
Performance Measures ◽  
Speech Sound ◽  
Naming Task ◽  
Sample Type ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Speech Sample ◽  
Single Word ◽  
Speech Sound Disorders ◽  
Connected Speech ◽  
Speech Accuracy

Purpose Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are faced with the challenge of quickly and accurately identifying children who present with speech sound disorders (SSD) compared to typically developing (TD) children. The goal of this study was to compare the clinical relevance of two speech sampling methods (single-word vs. connected speech samples) in how sensitive they are in detecting atypical speech sound development in children, and to know whether the information obtained from single-word samples is representative enough of children's overall speech sound performance. Method We compared the speech sound performance of 37 preschool children with SSD ( M age = 4;11 years) and 37 age-sex-matched typically developing children ( M age = 5;0 years) by eliciting their speech in two ways: (a) a picture-naming task to elicit single words, and (b) a story-retelling task to elicit connected speech. Four speech measures were compared across sample type (single words vs. connected speech) and across groups (SSD vs. TD): intelligibility, speech accuracy, phonemic inventory, and phonological patterns. Results Interaction effects were found between sample type and group on several speech sound performance measures. Single-word speech samples were found to differentiate the SSD group from the TD group, and were more sensitive than connected speech samples across various measures. The effect size of single-word samples was consistently higher than connected speech samples for three measures: intelligibility, speech accuracy, and phonemic inventory. The gap in sample type informativeness may be attributed to salience and avoidance effects, given that children tend to avoid producing unfamiliar phonemes in connected speech. The number of phonological patterns produced was the only measure that revealed no gap between two sampling types for both groups. Conclusions On measures of intelligibility, speech accuracy, and phonemic inventory, obtaining a single-word sample proved to be a more informative method of differentiating children with SSD from TD children than connected speech samples. This finding may guide SLPs in their choice of sampling type when they are under time pressure. We discuss how children's performance on the connected speech sample may be biased by salience and avoidance effects and/or task design, and may, therefore, not necessarily reveal a poorer performance than single-word samples, particularly in intelligibility, speech accuracy, and the number of phonological patterns, if these task limitations are circumvented. Our findings show that the performance gap, typically observed between the two sampling types, largely depends on which performance measures are evaluated with the speech sample. Our study is the first to address sampling type differences in SSD versus TD children and has significant clinical implications for SLPs looking for sampling types and measures that reliably identify SSD in preschool-aged children.

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