Reporting Bilingual Results

A question that often comes up about our research is how to apply it clinically. Much of our work is motivated by clinical questions and ultimately we aim to have some clinical solutions. It’s hard sometimes to move directly from research to application. Sometimes the clinical questions we pose have no or very little research available to move to the next step. So, we have to step back and do the more basic descriptive work to understand the nature of bilingualism and of bilingual impairment before we can then more forward again to answer questions about assessment and treatment. Now that we’ve done more work that has implications for assessment and have the BESA available for clinicians we can start to think about more direct application.

I wrote a year ago that we can get the most accurate indicator of language impairment on the BESA when we combine the best language across domains. So, we might combine Spanish morphosyntax with English semantics for a language composite. But, how do you write up results to incorporate into a report?

In a fairly recent paper, we provide some illustrations of how to use test information to make clinical decisions using the BESA. We go through the parent and teacher interview we use to determine possible concern about speech and language ability in each language and how we determine language use and exposure. Finally, we demonstrate how we combine and compare Spanish and English performance across each domain to determine language impairment. I hope these help in writing up your clinical reports.

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Easy and Hard Sounds

We have a new paper looking at the relationship between children’s dual-language exposure and age of English acquisition on production of early- middle- and late-acquired sounds. Previous work by Leah Fabiano-Smith & Brian Goldstein shows that children are most accurate on early developing sounds compared to later developing sounds. Further, bilinguals show the same pattern although they may be a little less accurate as a group compared to monolingual English and monolingual Spanish peers. In the current study, we wanted to explore the influence of children’s experience in Spanish and English and how this experience might influence sound production. We were also interested in how parent and teacher ratings lined up with children’s production accuracy given their level of experience in each language.

Screening for Speech & Language Impairment

Well, it’s that time of year— fall is upon us. At UT, that means new students (and likely their parents) driving down San Antonio (a one way street) in the wrong direction. So far, I’ve spotted one driver doing this and it’s sure to increase as students move in and as classes start in a couple of weeks.

For those of you who work in elementary schools or preschool settings, screening may be part of the fall routine. I remember I worked for a few years in Head Start and we would screen children every fall. My first year (1984) I remember we just made up a screener. The SLPs and I got together and came up with a form and a few questions that we would talk to kids about while we observed their speech and language. Later on as there was less money to spend on things like screening, we relied on teacher referral. I did notice that often teachers made referrals if children had articulation errors but not much else. And many of the 3 year olds were being referred for typical developmental errors. So, we went to a modified screening procedure where we asked teachers to complete a form that focused their attention on aspects of speech and language that might be problematic for given ages. We would sit together to then determine if the child had more typical developmental errors or if a referral was really warranted. It also helped us to pick up on children who might have language-based impairment as well.