Spanish Bilingual Morphosyntactic Development in Bilingual Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder: Articles, Clitics, Verbs, and the Subjunctive Mood.
Anny Castilla-Earls, Juliana Ronderos, Lisa Fitton
PMID 37586692WHAT IT FOUND
Bilingual Spanish children with DLD showed significantly lower accuracy than peers with typical development, and this gap did not close by age 8.
Both groups improved over time, but older children learned more slowly. Articles and verbs were easier than clitics and the subjunctive.
Key findings
01Children with DLD had significantly lower probability of correct responses than children with TD at the onset of the study for articles, clitics, verbs, and the subjunctive.
02The performance gap between children with DLD and children with TD remained significant across all time points and did not close by age 9 for clitics.
03Older children at study enrollment showed slower growth in accuracy over time compared to younger children across all four grammatical forms.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The children with TD were, on average, older than the children with DLD at the start of the study, which may have impacted the precision of estimates for older children with DLD and younger children with TD. The study did not analyze the types of errors made (e.g., omission vs substitution), limiting understanding of the nature of the morphosyntactic difficulties. English morphosyntactic growth was not examined, so the results only describe Spanish development. The study had a wide age range and limited sample size, which may affect the generalizability of the growth trajectories. Data collection modality changed from in-person to remote during the study, which may have influenced performance, although the authors suggest telepractice yields similar results.
Declared interests
The research was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that the slower growth rate observed in older children indicates a loss of skill or regression. The study found that all children, both with and without DLD, continued to increase in accuracy over time. The slower slope for older children reflects a deceleration in the rate of new learning, not a decline in existing abilities.