Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the appropriateness of standardized assessments of expressive grammar and vocabulary in a sample of preschool-age dual language learners (DLLs) who use Jamaican Creole (JC) and English. Adult models from the same linguistic community as these children were used to inform culturally and…

Purpose: For speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working in schools, outcome measurement is an important element of practice, enabling us to evaluate the efficacy of our service provision and guiding future decision making, funding, and resource allocation. When selecting outcomes to measure, it is helpful to consider both the level at which…

Purpose: Educators often use results from static norm-referenced vocabulary assessments to aid in the diagnosis of school-age children with a language disorder. However, research has indicated that many of these vocabulary assessments yield inaccurate, biased results, especially with culturally and linguistically diverse children. This study…

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…

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…

Purpose: We compared teacher ratings as measured by the Teacher Rating of Oral Language and Literacy (TROLL; Dickinson, McCabe, & Sprague, 2001, 2003) and Children's Communication Checklist-Second Edition (CCC-2; Bishop, 2006) to 2 established screeners, the Part II of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Screening Test (DELV-ST-II;…

Purpose: This study explored the intervention processes used by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to treat children with speech sound disorders (SSDs). Method: Semistructured, individual, in-depth interviews were conducted with 11 Australian SLPs. Inductive content analysis was used to classify the data to provide a description of current…

Purpose: This study sought to identify an adequate intensity of interactive book reading for new word learning by children with specific language impairment (SLI) and to examine variability in treatment response. Method: An escalation design adapted from nontoxic drug trials (Hunsberger, Rubinstein, Dancey, & Korn, 2005) was used in this Phase…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine the concurrent validity and classification accuracy of 3 parent report measures of language development in Spanish-speaking toddlers. Method: Forty-five Spanish-speaking parents and their 2-year-old children participated. Twenty-three children had expressive language delays (ELDs) as…

Purpose: Cross-linguistic cognates are words that share form and meaning in two languages (e.g., "helicopter-helicoptero"); translation equivalents are words that share meaning but not form (e.g., "house-casa"). Research consistently demonstrates a performance speed and/or accuracy advantage for processing cognates versus noncognates in bilingual…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to (a) describe and compare the nonword repetition (NWR) performance of preschool-age Spanish-speaking children (3- to 5-year-olds) with and without language impairment (LI) across 2 scoring approaches and (b) to contrast the classification accuracy of a Spanish NWR task when item-level and percentage…

Purpose: This study examined the validity of 3 discourse comprehension measures for preschool children and the ability of a combination of them to classify children with and without language impairment. Method: Thirty-seven children with typical language and 12 children with language impairment completed 3 measures of oral story comprehension: the…

An examination of state laws and regulations reveals confusion with regard to the classification of exceptional children, particularly in the structuring of delivery systems for language, speech, and hearing services. (LH)

The study compared the categorization skills of first-grade children presenting three levels of expressive language development (normal, mild-moderate delay, and severe delay). Results indicated a significant difference in categorization skills between the children with normal expressive language development and each of the two expressive…

Discusses what children with developmental language disorders should be called, how they should be defined, and how we might differentiate children with specific language impairments from other children with developmental language disorders. The lack of congruence between clinical and research constructs is discussed. (Author/CR)