Adapting computerised language sample analysis for Jamaican Creole-Jamaican English-speaking preschoolers: A pilot study.
Nicole B M Bazzocchi, Koubra Hassan Haggar, Kereisha Biggs and 2 others
PMID 42635601WHAT IT FOUND
Adapting computerised language sample coding for Jamaican Creole-English preschoolers did not separate children with language disorder from typical peers, even though it raised grammaticality scores.
Typical children still had longer utterances and more different words.
Key findings
01In Jamaican English samples, typical children had higher average utterance length in words, total number of words, and number of different words than children with developmental language disorder under both coding protocols.
02Standard SALT coding averaged 54% grammatical utterances, and adapted SALT coding averaged 82% grammatical utterances, but percent grammatical utterances did not significantly differ between children with developmental language disorder and typical children.
03Overall rule-based and total transfer did not significantly differ between groups, but children with developmental language disorder used more lexical-based transfer than typical children.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study had only 18 children, so it is a pilot and cannot be treated as a diagnostic test. Children were classified as having developmental language disorder using caregiver and teacher or speech-language pathologist concerns in both languages, not with validated bilingual tools. Percent grammatical utterances had not previously been tested in Jamaican Creole-Jamaican English speakers, and it did not separate the groups here. The transfer coding list was exploratory and was not built from a normative dataset, so it may have guided coders toward expected patterns. The language samples mixed narrative and play-based tasks, and task type can shape language sample results. Two samples had only 25 utterances, while most had 50, so sample length was not perfectly consistent. The study did not provide norms for transfer patterns or for adapted percent grammatical utterances.
Declared interests
The authors reported no potential conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that adapted SALT can diagnose developmental language disorder in Jamaican Creole-Jamaican English preschoolers. The adapted coding raised grammaticality scores, but percent grammatical utterances did not separate the groups, and the study had only 18 children with exploratory coding.