Communication Disorders Quarterly

These case studies describe and compare the language characteristics of two bilingual children: one with specific language impairment (SLI) and one with normal language development (NL). Using spontaneous language sampling, we found that the linguistic skills of the bilingual child with SLI were qualitatively different from those of the NL child across languages. The child with SLI produced significantly more morphosyntactic errors and less variety of grammatical forms and sentence types in both languages as compared to the NL child. In addition, some of those errors were different from those typically produced by monolingual children with SLI or speakers of English as a second language. Furthermore, the bilingual child with SLI demonstrated significant first- language loss. These findings support the hypothesis that there are cross-linguistic variations of grammatical SLI markers, and they highlight the importance of early intervention in preventing first-language loss. Moreover, the findings suggest that clinicians should expect morphosyntactic differences between monolingual and bilingual children with SLI.

There is growing recognition of the communicative potential in many of the informal and idiosyncratic behaviors exhibited by children with developmental and physical disabilities. To assist in assessment and intervention planning, it would seem important to identify these potential communicative acts. To this end, the present article describes the development of the Inventory of Potential Communicative Acts (IPCA). The IPCA is an interview schedule designed to be completed by parents, teachers, and therapists of children with developmental and physical disabilities and severe communication impairment. It consists of 53 questions asking informants to indicate how the child communicates 10 distinct pragmatic functions. To date, pilot testing, development research, and field trials have involved 30 children. The results of this development work indicate that the IPCA is an efficient means of collecting accurate and verifiable data on the potential communicative acts of children with severe communication impairment associated with a range of developmental and physical disabilities. Use of the IPCA in communication assessment and intervention is discussed.

Modifiability is a central concept in the area of dynamic assessment. Yet, there has been little attempt to capture the essence of modifiability, either qualitatively or quantitatively. The two studies reported here used a scaling approach to measure components of modifiability. The results indicate that modifiability (here defined as a combination of planning, attention to task/discrimination, motivation, transfer, responsivity, and examiner effort) differentiates between children having low language ability and typically developing children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Furthermore, the individual components of modifiability, with the exception of motivation, significantly differentiated the two groups. These findings suggest that modifiability is a useful construct in providing a less biased assessment and that the descriptive results obtained from this observation can also be used to link assessment with intervention.

This study examined the extent to which linguistic variation in the English language might have been affecting the performance of 160 rural preschool children in Orangeburg, South Carolina, on four commonly used standardized tests. The children, ages 3-0 to 5-11 years, were administered the Patterned Elicitation Syntax Test, the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language-Revised, the Test of Language Development-2 Primary, and the Test of Pragmatic Skills. Results revealed that when dialectal variations were not considered, the performance of children in this study differed from that of the normative population on tests that assessed grammatical morphemes.

The objective of this study was to assess the ability of young, bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) to detect and produce grammatically valid "definite article + noun" forms in Spanish. We focused on this particular form because the Spanish language requires agreement between definite articles and their accompanying noun forms. In English, there is no translation equivalent for this obligatory agreement. We were interested in whether children with SLI in a bilingual environment would acquire this form in a predictable, developmental manner. Results of the study indicated that, despite their language handicap, our participants performed in a rather expected manner. That is, as a group, they were more likely to offer an accurate response when the response followed an implicit morphemic rule. Therefore, our study supports the notion that children with language delays make use of Slobin's (1973) Operating Principles, which predict that, in an attempt to understand language, children will pay attention to the occurrence of particular speech segments in the language.