Spanish morphosyntactic growth (Castilla-Earls et al., 2023)

This presentation video is from the Research Symposium at the 2022 Annual Convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association held in New Orleans, LA.

The abstract for the accompanying article is below. This article is part of the JSLHR Forum: Research Symposium on Bilingualism.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the growth of previously established clinical markers of developmental language disorder (DLD) in Spanish-speaking bilingual children with and without DLD.

Method: Forty-three bilingual children with DLD and 57 typically developing children were tested 3 times over a 2-year period. Their average age at Time 1 was 5;10 (years;months). All children completed an elicitation task examining the production of articles, clitics, verbs, and the subjunctive mood in Spanish at each time point, in addition to other behavioral testing in Spanish and English. We used growth curve analysis to examine change patterns of the morphosyntactic structures over time.

Results: At the onset of the study, children without DLD produced higher accuracy rates than children with DLD across all morphosyntactic structures. In addition, there was a positive effect of time on all structures. Furthermore, the interaction between time and DLD was statistically significant for clitic pronouns.

Conclusion: In agreement with previous literature on language growth in monolingual children with DLD, bilingual children with DLD showed language growth that was parallel to that of bilingual children without DLD but with significantly lower levels of attainment.

Supplemental Material S1. Examples of items from the Elicitation Task (Desarrollo Morfosintáctico del Español, DEME).

Supplemental Material S2. Main effects model (no interactions between primary predictors): articles as reference (log-odds).

Supplemental Material S3. Predicting responses without accounting for age or time: articles as reference (log-odds).

Supplemental Material S4. Model including interactions predicting responses to DEME Item: clitics as reference (log-odds).

Supplemental Material S5. Model including interactions predicting responses to DEME item: verbs as reference (log-odds).

Supplemental Material S6. Model including interactions predicting responses to DEME item: subjunctive as reference (log-odds).

Castilla-Earls, A., Ronderos, J., & Fitton, L. (2023). Spanish bilingual morphosyntactic development in bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder: Articles, clitics, verbs, and the subjunctive mood. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 66(12), 4678–4698. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_JSLHR-23-00091

Publisher Note: This article is part of the Forum: Research Symposium on Bilingualism.