Language sample measures and language ability in Spanish-English bilingual kindergarteners

Abstract

Measures of productivity and sentence organization are useful metrics for quantifying language development and language impairments in monolingual and bilingual children. It is not yet known what measures within and across languages are most informative when evaluating the language skills of bilingual children. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how measures of language productivity and organization in two languages converge with children's measured language abilities on the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA), a standardized measure of language ability. 170 kindergarten age children who produced narrative language samples in Spanish and in English based on a wordless picture book were included in the analysis. Samples were analyzed for number of utterances, number of different words, mean length of utterance, and percentage of grammatical utterances. The best predictors of language ability as measured by the BESA scores were English MLU, English grammaticality, and Spanish grammaticality. Results are discussed in relationship to the nature of the measures in each of the languages and in regard to their potential utility for identifying low language ability in bilingual children.

Russian language proficiency of monolingual and Russian–English bi/multilingual children

“…Picture book narratives are commonly used for assessing bilingual children's speech, since they are easy to set up, pleasing and appropriate for children, and serve as an efficient way to solicit a complex language output that can be evaluated for multiple linguistic features (e.g., Bedore et al, 2010;Squires et al, 2014).…”

“…Other factors in heritage language proficiency include age of arrival, and maternal education levels (Jia & Paradis, 2015). Some studies also suggest that language use is an important predictor of children's language fluency (Bedore, Peña, Gillam, & Tsung-Han, 2010, Hammer et al, 2012. By contrast, a few studies seem to indicate that the frequency of language use does not predict fluency (Schmidt, 2007;Zaretsky & Bar-Shalom, 2010).…”

“…A number of linguistic and applied linguistic studies have attempted to evaluate the language proficiency of multilingual children vis-à-vis their monolingual peers (e.g., Paradis et al, 2003;Bedore et al, 2010;Jia & Paradis, 2015). Some studies point to existing fundamental similarities in language acquisition and performance by young monolingual and bilingual children and infants (e.g., Fennell & Byers-Heinlein, 2014;Jia & Paradis 2015).…”

“…One limitation of the above research is that, due to the status of various languages, the demographics of their speakers, and language policies, most research on bilingualism in North America is done with French-English and Spanish-English bilinguals (e.g., Paradis et al, 2003;Weikum et al, 2007;Sebastián-Gallés, Albareda-Castellot, Weikum, & Werker, 2012;Bedore et al, 2010;Hoff et al, 2014). However, the mechanics of bilingualism can be better understood if the scope of languages involved in research is broadened, since bilingual input is extremely diverse in terms of the languages involved, the linguistic level of the speakers, their age, gender, and other factors (Havy, Bouchon, & Nazzi, 2016, p. 420).…”

Language Sample Length Effects on Various Lexical Diversity Measures: An Analysis of Spanish Language Samples from Children

“…The goal has been to identify a measure of lexical diversity that is effective, yet minutely affected by language sample length. Studies have been conducted in various languages including English (Owen & Leonard, 2002;Heilmann, Nockerts & Miller, 2010;McCarthy & Jarvis, 2010;Kover et al, 2012;Fergadiotis, Wright & Green, 2015), Cantonese (Klee et al, 2004;Wong et al, 2010), Chinese-English bilinguals (Ooi & Wong, 2012) and Spanish-English bilinguals (Simon-Cereijido & Gutierrez-Clellen, 2009;Bedore et al, 2010). Unfortunately, not all of these studies used the same measure of lexical diversity indices or sample demographic.…”