Second language learners in Utah

I am on my way home from teaching a two day seminar at the University of Utah Collage of Health. We covered a lot of ground in two days. From culture to contrasts between languages; bilingualism, assessment, and intervention. I learned a lot and the grad students were great. Nice discussions, creative applications of the principles we studied and good detective work.

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What does convergence tell us about language impairment and bilingualism?

In a paper we published last year, we examined how bilingual children with and without language impairment performed on a repeated associations task. We’d found that children with impairment has lower semantic depth scores even after we controlled for their vocabulary size. Also, their conceptual scores were higher than single language scores which tell us that bilinguals make different associations within each of their languages for the same things. One thing we’d observed in the paper was that it seemed that children with language impairment came up with different items compared to those with typical development. Our recently published paper explores this further examining the original data more closely.