Article 1: Spanish, English, and Bilingual Children's Performance in Semantic Tasks
I'm going to try to post one article summary per week to keep up on evidence-based practice and to provide others with a "quick look" at articles that I think are helpful resources. It'll be written like an annotated bibliography with quotes that might be important for a particular case I'm working with at the time.
Peña, E., Bedore, L.M., & Rappazzo, C. (2003). Comparison of Spanish, English, and bilingual children's performance across semantic tasks. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 34: 5-16.
*The underlines are my additions for getting a quicker overview!*
Keywords: bilinguals, Spanish, English, semantic development, semantic assessment
Can be used for:
-Multicultural and bilingual essay prompts and questions on comps and praxis
-Writing goals/justifying treatment goals for Spanish-only, English-only, and bilingual Spanish-English school-aged children
-Cultural competence
Purpose: Study compared predominantly Spanish-speaking, predominantly English-speaking, and Spanish-English bilingual children's performance on a battery of six semantic tasks.
Method: Six semantic tasks included associations, characteristic properties, categorization, functions, linguistic concepts, and similarities and differences in Spanish and English. The tasks were not directly translated, but used comparable items to be linguistically sensitive. Each task included both receptive and expressive items. Each child (n = 55) completed the tasks in the language(s) they were predominant in.
Results: Children in all three groups achieved similar average levels of performance on the assessment battery. However, there were differences in the patterns of performance for English and Spanish and within group differences.
Clinical Implications: These findings highlight the importance of testing bilingual children in both of their languages and across a variety of semantic tasks in order to gain insight into bilingual children's semantic knowledge. Test beyond the ceiling and below the basal (p. 13) for non-English or bilingual children to get a truer score and picture of their abilities for reports. Test in BOTH LANGUAGES. Use interactive approaches for qualitative assessment of the child's semantic knowledge to allow them to show their depth of knowledge and become familiar with new tasks.
Important points to note:
Peña, E., Bedore, L.M., & Rappazzo, C. (2003). Comparison of Spanish, English, and bilingual children's performance across semantic tasks. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 34: 5-16.
*The underlines are my additions for getting a quicker overview!*
Keywords: bilinguals, Spanish, English, semantic development, semantic assessment
Can be used for:
-Multicultural and bilingual essay prompts and questions on comps and praxis
-Writing goals/justifying treatment goals for Spanish-only, English-only, and bilingual Spanish-English school-aged children
-Cultural competence
Purpose: Study compared predominantly Spanish-speaking, predominantly English-speaking, and Spanish-English bilingual children's performance on a battery of six semantic tasks.
Method: Six semantic tasks included associations, characteristic properties, categorization, functions, linguistic concepts, and similarities and differences in Spanish and English. The tasks were not directly translated, but used comparable items to be linguistically sensitive. Each task included both receptive and expressive items. Each child (n = 55) completed the tasks in the language(s) they were predominant in.
Results: Children in all three groups achieved similar average levels of performance on the assessment battery. However, there were differences in the patterns of performance for English and Spanish and within group differences.
Clinical Implications: These findings highlight the importance of testing bilingual children in both of their languages and across a variety of semantic tasks in order to gain insight into bilingual children's semantic knowledge. Test beyond the ceiling and below the basal (p. 13) for non-English or bilingual children to get a truer score and picture of their abilities for reports. Test in BOTH LANGUAGES. Use interactive approaches for qualitative assessment of the child's semantic knowledge to allow them to show their depth of knowledge and become familiar with new tasks.
Important points to note:
- Deficits in semantic representation and organization are often described as part of a profile of language impairment. Dockrell, Messer, George, and Wilson (1998) found that approximately 23% of the children on school caseloads had word-finding difficulties. HOWEVER, single-word picture vocabulary tests may not be useful in identifying semantic difficulties, which is what these "word-finding difficulties" and language impairments are often based on
- Some tests in Spanish are directly translated from English, and thus, DO NOT reflect the development of language in Spanish speakers. Make sure you are using tests that are normed on a sampling representative of the population the child is from, be culturally relevant and familiar, and include "the developmental order of concepts, lexical frequency, and conversational focus in the language or languages being learned" (p. 8).
- On a macro level, the children scored similarly on all tasks. However, "within both Spanish and English, there were a few small differences that suggest that bilingual children in comparison to their predominantly English- and Spanish-speaking counterparts used different patterns of performance" (p. 13). That is, "bilingual speakers have a unique configuration in each language in comparison to monolingual speakers" when it comes to lexical production and semantic skills.
- When children are new to the American school system, if that is the case of a predominantly non-English speaker, they might be at a disadvantage on a given task because they are unfamiliar with the tasks rather than having a language deficit.
- "As children's semantic knowledge increases, they are able to manipulate word knowledge at the metalinguistic level. Thus, a child who knows about the basic object properties, as well as the relationships between objects, will be able to complete analogies...," retrieve words efficiently, and use precise words for an intended purpose/meaning (p. 6).
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