Purpose: This study examines the utility of Video-Implemented Script Training for Aphasia (VISTA) for improving speech production and fluency in a Spanish-English bilingual speaker with aphasia. Method: In this single-subject, multiple-baseline intervention study, VISTA was utilized to facilitate fluent and intelligible speech through training…

Purpose: Bilinguals tend to produce cognates (e.g., "telephone" in English and "teléfono" in Spanish) more accurately than they produce noncognates ("table"/"mesa"). We tested whether the same holds for bilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Participants included Spanish-English…

Purpose: The study examines the extent of convergence of semantic category members in Spanish-English bilingual children with reference to adults using a semantic fluency task. Method: Thirty-seven children with developmental language disorder (DLD), matched pairwise with 37 typically developing (TD) children in the age range of 7;0-9;11…

Theories of how language works have shifted from rule-like competence accounts to more skill-like incremental learning accounts. Under these, people acquire language incrementally, through practice, and may even lose it incrementally as they acquire competing mappings. Incremental learning implies that (1) a bilingual's abilities in their…

Purpose: The differential diagnosis of developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children represents a unique challenge due to their distributed language exposure and knowledge. The current evidence indicates that dual-language testing yields the most accurate classification of DLD among bilinguals, but there are limited personnel and…

This study sought to scaffold administration performance of a standardized bilingual screener to sufficient levels of accuracy for data collection using principles of Cognitive Load Theory by managing task complexity when training pre-service clinicians. Before training administration skills, two students were given copies of the manual for the…

Purpose: Using a blocked cyclic picture-naming task, we compared accuracy and error patterns across languages for Spanish-English bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Pictured stimuli were manipulated for semantic similarity across two (Same and Mixed) category contexts. Children's productions were…

Purpose: This study examines English performance on a set of 11 grammatical forms in Spanish-English bilingual, school-age children in order to understand how item difficulty of grammatical constructions helps correctly classify language impairment (LI) from expected variability in second language acquisition when taking into account linguistic…

Children with Developmental language disorder (DLD) have particular difficulty learning language despite otherwise general normal development. When school age bilingual children struggle with language, a common question is if the difficulties they present reflect lack of ability or lack of language experience. To address the question of…

Purpose: This study examined the use of African American English (AAE) among a group of young Latinx bilingual children and the accuracy of the English Morphosyntax subtest of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA) in classifying these children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Children (N = 81) between the…

Purpose: This study examined the effects of single-language and conceptual scoring on the vocabulary performance of bilingual children with and without specific language impairment. We assessed classification accuracy across 3 scoring methods. Method: Participants included Spanish-English bilingual children (N = 247) aged 5;1 (years;months) to…

Background: Significant progress has been made in the identification of language impairment in children are bilingual. Bilingual children's vocabulary knowledge may be distributed across languages. Thus, when testing bilingual children it is difficult to know how to weigh each language for diagnostic purposes. Even when conceptual scoring is used…

Purpose: Our proof-of-concept study tested the feasibility of virtual testing using child assessments that were originally validated for in-person testing only. Method: Ten adult-child dyads were assigned to complete both in-person and virtual tests of language, cognition, and narratives. Child participants fell between the ages of 4 and 8 years;…

This study applied the dynamic assessment (DA) of narratives in a bilingual Spanish- and English-speaking early elementary population. We examined transfer and change in narrative performance within and across languages after mediated learning experience (MLE) in Spanish or English. Sixty-eight bilingual children were randomized to two groups:…

This pilot study evaluates the feasibility of an integrated intervention titled "Language and Literacy Together" developed to target semantic and narrative skills in bilingual children at risk for developmental language disorder (DLD). Thirteen first-grade bilingual children who scored in the risk range for DLD on the Bilingual English…