There is limited research regarding what levels of proficiency in each language should characterize the language behavior of bilingual children and the impact of language exposure or language use variables on bilingual performance. This study was designed to examine the extent to which years of exposure to a language(s), amount of language input at home and at school, and amount of exposure to reading and other literacy activities in a language(s) relate to observed bilingual performance in young children, as obtained from parent and teacher reports. A secondary goal was to determine the extent to which parents or teachers could assist in determining language status by examining relationships between their ratings of the child's use and proficiency in the two languages and the child's grammatical performance. Fifty-seven children and their families were sampled from second grade classes of a large school district serving primarily low-income families in southern California. Multiple regression analyses for each language indicated that amount of Spanish input at home was a significant predictor of grammatical performance in that language. These input effects did not hold for English. Although there were some crosslinguistic differences, parent and teacher ratings of use and proficiency correlated with the child's grammatical performance in the target language. The findings suggest that parent and teacher estimates may be useful to determine bilingual status.

This paper describes the early lexical development of a group of 328 normal Spanish-speaking children aged o;8 to 257. First the development and structure of a new parent report instrument, Inventario del Desarollo de Habilidades Communcativas is described. Then five studies carried out with the instrument are presented. In the first study vocabulary development of Spanish-speaking infants and toddlers is 523 19-2 CHILD LANGUAGE compared to that of English-speaking infants and toddlers. The English data were gathered using a comparable parental report, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. In the second study the general characteristics of Spanish language acquisition, and the effects of various demographic factors on that process, are examined. Study 3 examines the differential effects of three methods of collecting the data (mail-in, personal interview, and clinic waiting room administration). Studies 4 and 5 document the reliability and validity of the instrument. Results show that the trajectories of development are very similar for Spanishand English-speaking children in this age range, that children from varying social groups develop similarly, and that mail-in and personal interview administration techniques produce comparable results. Inventories administered in a medical clinic waiting room, on the other hand, produced lower estimates of toddler vocabulary than the other two models.

The purpose of this study is twofold: (a) to examine whether English finite morphology has the potential to differentiate children with and without language impairment (LI) from Spanish-speaking backgrounds and different levels of English proficiency in comparison to Hispanic English speakers and (b) to investigate the extent to which children who are bilingual exhibit differences in their grammatical performance because of cross-linguistic influence from their first language. Seventy-one children between the ages of 4 years, 5 months and 6 years, 5 months were distributed into the following five groups: English as a first language (EL1) speakers with typical language development (TLD), EL1 speakers with LI, Spanish-English bilinguals with TLD, Spanish-English bilinguals with LI, and English as a second language (EL2) learners with TLD were compared on regular verb finiteness and nominative subject use using spontaneous narrative samples. The EL1 children with LI had significantly lower verb accuracy rates than the EL1 controls with TLD. Verb finiteness marking was also a significant discriminator for the bilinguals with LI. There was no evidence of cross-linguistic influence, however. The analysis indicated no significant differences between EL1 and bilingual children on subject or verb use. The EL2 group only presented difficulties with finite verb use. The typological differences between English and Spanish for overt subject use did not seem to affect the performance of either typical or atypical bilingual learners. The findings underscore the need for addressing language dominance in future bilingual studies.

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Purpose-The purpose of this study was to evaluate the discriminant accuracy of a grammatical measure for the identification of language impairment in Latino Spanish-speaking children. The authors hypothesized that if exposure to and use of English as a second language have an effect on the first language, bilingual children might exhibit lower rates of grammatical accuracy than their peers and be more likely to be misclassified.Method-Eighty children with typical language development and 80 with language impairment were sampled from 4 different geographical regions and compared using linear discriminant function analysis.Results-Results indicated fair-to-good sensitivity from 4;0 to 5;1 years, good sensitivity from 5;2 to 5;11 years, and poor sensitivity above age 6 years. The discriminant functions derived from the exploratory studies were able to predict group membership in confirmatory analyses with fairto-excellent sensitivity up to age 6 years. Children who were bilingual did not show lower scores and were not more likely to be misclassified compared with their Spanish-only peers.Conclusions-The measure seems to be appropriate for identifying language impairment in either Spanish-dominant or Spanish-only speakers between 4 and 6 years of age. However, for older children, supplemental testing is necessary. Keywordschildren; Spanish-speaking; discriminant accuracy Accurate identification of language impairment in Spanish-speaking children who are learning English as a second language is critical for the design of appropriate treatments and for the prevention of academic delays later in school. For tests to have adequate classification, they should demonstrate high sensitivity (i.e., the proportion of true positives correctly identified by the test) and high specificity (i.e., the proportion of true negatives correctly identified by the test). Plante and Vance (1994) indicated that a sensitivity and specificity of 80% is considered fair and above 90% is considered good. However, it is difficult to find measures that identify language disorders with accuracies above 90%, even NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript in monolingual English speakers. Research in this area is limited, and most tests lack acceptable levels of diagnostic accuracy because of the language areas assessed, the tasks used, and the procedures utilized to sample participants in the development of test norms.Attempts to adapt standardized English tests have not been successful. Restrepo and Silverman (2001), for example, found that the use of a Spanish adaptation of the Preschool Language Scale-3 (Zimmerman, Steiner, & Pond, 1993) with a group of Spanish-speaking children yielded scores below one standard deviation from the mean in the receptive and expressive language scales. They concluded that the use of such a test would lead to overidentification of typically developing children as having language impairment. In addition, item progression in the test did not demonstrate a developmental trend, a...