Beyond Test Scores: Using Drawings and Language Samples to Characterize Multilingual Children's Language Profiles.
Nicole B M Bazzocchi, Leslie E Kokotek, Kathryn Crowe and 1 others
PMID 40054493WHAT IT FOUND
Adding drawings and child self-reports to language testing helped reveal communication experiences that test scores alone missed.
Children with language disorders reported more negative feelings about talking, especially in the school language, even when their language test scores did not differ between languages.
Key findings
01Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) drew themselves talking and happy less often than typically developing children, particularly in the school language (Jamaican English).
02Language sample analysis measures successfully distinguished children with DLD from typically developing peers in both languages, except for lexical diversity and question/negation syntax.
03Children with DLD reported more positive emotions about communicating in their community language (Jamaican Creole) than in their school language (Jamaican English), despite similar language abilities in both.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample size was very small (19 children), which limits the generalizability of the findings and the statistical power to detect differences. The study was conducted with a specific language pair (Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English) in a specific cultural context. Findings may not apply to other multilingual populations. Drawings provided only a 'snapshot' of the child's experience at one time point, whereas communication experiences can change over time. Two different methods were used to collect language samples (narrative and play-based), which could introduce variability.
Declared interests
The authors declared no relevant conflicts of interest. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (N.I.H.).
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a child's language test scores in two languages will always match their feelings about communicating in those languages. A child may perform similarly on tests in both languages but feel significantly more negative or anxious when speaking the school language, as seen in the drawings and self-reports of children with DLD in this study.