Project Activities
During Phase I, researchers plan to generate and validate tasks, which will include procedures for determining constructs of the assessment and processes to collect data that will refine the assessment. In Phase II, researchers will integrate the various tasks and items generated in Phase I into a preliminary form of the full screener. The internal structure of the screener and the quality of the items will be examined. Phase III will include establishing the validity of the full screening instrument, including the validation of cut-scores and decision rules for score interpretation.
Structured Abstract
Setting
Elementary schools are located in Arizona.
Sample
A total of 2500 Latino children will be recruited from preschools and elementary schools. Students will speak Spanish as their first language and have limited English. Children with suspected language disorders and typically developing children will be included. Children with language disorders will meet the following criteria: (a) qualify for speech and language services based on their scores on speech and language assessments, and (b) have parent or teacher concern. Typically developing children will meet the following criteria: (a) no history of language or developmental delay, based on parent and teacher reports, and (b) score within the typical range on a standardized language assessment.
Research design and methods
The screener will be developed in three phases. Phase I will consist of task development, item writing, item analysis, and validation. The tasks to be developed will include targeting skills in rapid automatized naming, nonword repetition, sentence recall, fast mapping, word association, and morphological cloze task. During Phase II, the screening instrument will be assembled. The internal structure of the screener and the quality of the items will be examined. In Phase III, the screener validity and decision rules will be examined for validity and reliability on a sample of Spanish-speaking children.
Key measures
Student measures will be used for two purposes: to identify language impairments and to assess language proficiency. Two standardized measures will be used to identify language impairment in Spanish-speaking children for validation of the screening instrument: (a) the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment and (b) the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals, Spanish Edition. Parent report will also be used in conjunction with standardized measures to identify language impairment. One standardized measure will be used to assess language proficiency: The Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test, Bilingual Version. Parent report of language use and proficiency, as well as the Teacher Language Observation Questionnaire, will also be used to assess language proficiency.
Data analytic strategy
In Phase I, data analysis includes analysis and imputation of missing data, descriptive analyses of individual items, and task analysis to identify items from the initial pool that have the highest item-total correlations and strongest predictive power. Analysis in Phase II focuses on three main issues: (1) item analysis to identify equivalent and discriminating items for parallel forms of the screener, (2) estimates of internal consistency and inter-rater reliability, and (3) construct validation including structural and external aspects of validity. Analysis in Phase III examines equivalence of the screener scores across gender and SES, validation of the cut-scores and decision rules for score interpretation, and examination of score reliability in terms of stability.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
Products: The products of this project include a fully developed screening instrument to identify Spanish-speaking students with language impairment, administration and scoring specifications, decision rules and interpretation guide for language impairment identification, published reports, and presentations.
Journal article, monograph, or newsletter
Castilla-Earls, A., Perez-Leroux, A.T., Restrepo, M.A., Gaile, D., and Chen, Z. (in press). The Complexity of the Spanish Subjunctive in Bilingual Children with SLI. Language Acquisition. doi:10.1080/10489223.2016.1192636
Castilla-Earls, A., Restrepo, M.A., Perez-Leroux, A.T., Gray, S., Holmes, P., Gail, D., and Chen, Z. (2015). Interactions Between Bilingual Effects and Language Impairment: Exploring Grammatical Markers in Spanish-Speaking Bilingual Children. Applied Psycholinguistics: 1-27. doi:10.1017/S0142716415000521
Kapantzoglou, M., Restrepo, M.A., Gray, S., and Thompson, M.S. (2015). Language Ability Groups in Bilingual Children: A Latent Profile Analysis. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 58(5): 1549-1562. doi:10.1044/2015_JSLHR-L-14-0290
Kapantzoglou, M., Thompson, M.S., Gray, S., and Restrepo, M.A. (2016). Assessing Measurement Invariance for Spanish Sentence Repetition and Morphology Elicitation Tasks. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 59(2): 254-266. doi:10.1044/2015_JSLHR-L-14-0319
Morgan, G.P., Restrepo, M.A., and Auza, A. (2013). Comparison of Spanish Morphology in Monolingual and Spanish-English Bilingual Children With and Without Language Impairment. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16(3): 578-596. doi:10.1017/S1366728912000697
Smyk, E., Restrepo, M.A., Gorin, J., and Gray, S. (2013). Development and Validation of the Spanish-English Language Proficiency Scale (SELPS). Language Speech and Hearing Services in the Schools, 44(3): 252-265. doi:10.1044/0161-1461(2013/12-0074)
Questions about this project?
To answer additional questions about this project or provide feedback, please contact the program officer.
