Language assessment of Polish-English bilingual children by speech and language therapists who do not speak Polish: A feasibility study of a novel scoring schema for Sentence-Repetition-Tasks.
Saoirse Lally, Natalia Banasik-Jemielniak, Ewa Haman and 1 others
PMID 39970418WHAT IT FOUND
English-speaking therapists can score a Polish sentence-repetition task by working with a Polish teacher using a new word-by-word grid.
Scores matched those from Polish linguists closely. However, the teacher marked some grammatical slips as correct, so the grid needs specific allowances before it can diagnose reliably.
Key findings
01Scores produced by an English-speaking therapist working with a Polish teacher correlated highly with those produced by Polish linguists.
02The teacher did not mark certain grammatical errors, such as omitted case endings or changed verb aspects, as incorrect, unlike the linguists.
03Children with typical development scored higher than those with suspected disorder in both languages, regardless of which scoring method was used.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study had only 27 children, which is too small to confirm how well this method works in real clinics. The children with suspected disorder were not confirmed as having developmental language disorder; they were referred to therapy but had not been assessed in Polish. The scoring method has not been tested with other therapists or interpreters, only the researcher and one teacher. The teacher’s leniency on certain grammatical errors suggests the scoring rules are not yet calibrated for this specific bilingual population.
Declared interests
Funded by the Irish Research Council. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat the high correlation between the teacher and linguist scores as proof that this method is ready for diagnosis. The teacher marked some grammatical errors as correct because they are common in this bilingual community, which means the current scoring rules may over-identify disorder in children who are simply using typical bilingual patterns.