Understanding (un)grammaticality in context: Evidence from young Spanish-English bilinguals over time.
Alicia G Escobedo, John F Gallagher, Irina Potapova and 2 others
PMID 36434924WHAT IT FOUND
In preschool Spanish-English bilinguals, English grammaticality scores grew and stayed stable over a school year.
Spanish scores did not change on average, and individual children rose or fell unpredictably. Low Spanish scores alone are not evidence of disorder.
Key findings
01English percent grammatical utterances increased significantly over the school year, while Spanish percent grammatical utterances did not.
02English grammaticality rankings remained stable across the year, but Spanish grammaticality rankings did not correlate between the start and end of the year.
03Spanish grammaticality showed no meaningful association with other language sample measures, unlike English grammaticality which correlated with several English measures.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was very small (19 children) and drawn from a single preschool in the southwestern United States, limiting generalizability. Language samples were elicited with play-based and picture-description tasks rather than narratives, and materials were not counterbalanced across languages, which may have influenced grammaticality scores. Caregiver reports of language exposure were limited; four caregivers did not specify the percentage of home language use. The study included only typically developing children, so it does not establish how these patterns differ in children with developmental language disorder.
Declared interests
The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (Extramural). No commercial conflicts of interest are reported in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a child’s Spanish grammaticality score is a reliable measure of their language ability or that a lack of growth indicates a disorder. The study found that Spanish PGU was unstable over time and unrelated to other Spanish language measures, meaning a single score or a year’s change in Spanish PGU cannot be interpreted without analyzing the actual utterances and considering the child’s exposure to English-only instruction.