Browsing by Author "Ronderos, Juliana"
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Item Effect of Word Origin in Romance Bilinguals(2019-05) Vasquez, MelanyEnglish is a Germanic language which has, over time, been influenced by Latin and Ancient Greek and borrowing from other European languages, including French, Dutch, and German. Words in the English language which originate from Latin are usually of technical or academic register and acquired at later ages in development. This type of vocabulary is usually used by scholars. The English language also contains a word from the Anglo-Saxon/Germanic background. This words usually are of lower academic register and are learned at an earlier age. The purpose of this study was to see if speaking a romance language could be advantageous for bilinguals, especially in continuing higher levels of education. We used a lexical decision task where participants were presented with Latin origin words and non-words and Anglo-Saxon/Germanic origin words and non-words. The task consisted of deciding if the stimuli presented was a word or non-word. The hypothesis for the current study was that non-romance language speakers would be more accurate at identifying Anglo-Saxon root words, and romance language speakers would be more accurate at identifying Latin root words. Also, romance language speakers should be better at recognizing that presented pseudowords are in fact non-words due to their background in romance languages influenced by Latin. On the other hand, non-romance language speakers should have a harder time recognizing that presented Latin pseudowords are in fact nonwords. Results: overall romance language speaker participants scored higher on accuracy when presented with Latin origin stimuli but took longer at identifying the stimuli. Interesting enough romance language speakers also scored higher in accuracy when presented with Anglo-Saxon/Germanic origin stimuli. On the other hand, non-romance language speakers scored higher in accuracy at recognizing Latin origin non-words.Item English Tense/Agreement Measures as Potential Diagnostic Markers in Spanish-English Bilinguals with Developmental Language Disorder(2020-08) Ronderos, Juliana; Hernandez, Arturo E.; Castilla-Earls, Anny; Mills, Monique T.Considerable individual variability is characteristic of bilingual language development, including the development and mastery of morphosyntactic skills (Paradis, 2005; Paradis et al., 2008). To address this variability, best practices for assessment of language disorders in bilingual children recommend evaluating both languages to take into account any cultural and linguistic biases (Bedore & Peña, 2008; Kohnert, 2010). However, bilingual assessment is not always feasible. In the current study, we explored the potential clinical use of an English-only assessment approach using tense/agreement composite measures. Participants included 93 Spanish-English typically developing bilingual children and 62 peers with language disorders. Measures of tense/agreement diversity, productivity, and accuracy (Hadley & Short, 2005; Bedore & Leonard, 1998) were calculated from language samples in English. We created a new measure, morphosyntactic development levels, inspired on the tense/agreement composites while also considering a child’s relative language dominance and length of exposure to English. The morphosyntactic development levels reflected diversity and productivity of tense/agreement morphemes and then evaluated accuracy after sufficient levels of diversity and productivity were reached. All measures were evaluated with regards to their ability to predict group difference and their discriminant accuracy for clinical utility. All measures demonstrated the ability to predict group differences. The morphosyntactic development levels provided the most informative results and classification accuracy values. These results suggest that English-only language measures may have informative value in assessment of bilingual children’s language when used in combination with parental report, language dominance, and exposure information.Item Language Dimensionality and the Contribution of Cognitive Abilities on Verbal Repetition Tasks Performance in Spanish-English Bilingual Children with and without Developmental Language Disorders(2022-08-19) Ronderos, Juliana; Hernandez, Arturo E.; Castilla-Earls, Anny; Yoshida, Hanako; Tamber-Rosenau, Benjamin J.; Fitton, LisaPurpose: In the first study, we explored the dimensionality of language abilities in bilingual children using measures of vocabulary and morphosyntax in English and Spanish used clinically to identify bilingual children with DLD. In the second study, we look at selected cognitive processing skills to better understand their unique contribution to performance in verbal repetition tasks (sentence repetition and nonword repetition), which are frequently part of standardized language assessments for the diagnosis of DLD. Method: Participants included 112 Spanish-English bilingual children ages 4-8 from a wide range of language abilities and language dominance profiles. Participants completed a battery of cognitive assessments and language assessments in Spanish and English. The cognitive session included general measures of cognitive abilities (nonverbal IQ and processing speed), short-term memory and working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory/attentional control. The language sessions included measures of vocabulary and morphosyntax from both norm-referenced assessments and language samples. Results: In the first study, the model which best fit the data was a model with two correlated factors, one for Spanish and one for English. This model used a subset of the observed measures from norm-referenced assessments and language samples representing vocabulary and morphosyntax in both languages. In the second study, results indicate that the strongest predictors for SR task are measures of language abilities and then measures of short-term memory. For NWR, the strongest predictors are measures of short-term memory and then measures of language ability. Conclusions: These results indicate that the structure of language in bilinguals is different from that previously found in English monolingual children of similar ages. In contrast to the unidimensional structure found for English monolingual children, language in Spanish-English children seems to represent two related but distinct constructs that may be influenced differently by language ability and language experience. Our results for the second study suggest that the verbal repetition tasks have similar underlying mechanisms. Although the skills to reproduce sentences and nonwords may overlap, it is understood that sentence repetition requires more linguistic knowledge than nonword repetition to reproduce the complete syntactic structure required. Clarifying how language in bilinguals is conceptualized and impacted by the concurrent development of two languages is an area that requires further research. Understanding both the dimensionality of language in bilinguals and the contribution of cognitive processing skills to language abilities can further assist our knowledge of how language develops in bilingual children and how it is affected by internal cognitive abilities.Item The Impact of COVID-19 School Closures and Home Language on the Spanish and English Receptive Vocabulary Trajectories in Bilingual Children(2021-04-01) Martinez, Damaris; Ronderos, JulianaPurpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic and the home language on bilingual children’s receptive vocabulary in both languages. Method: 113 bilingual children between 4-8 years old with and without developmental language disorders (DLD) participated in the first year of the longitudinal study all with face-to-face (F2F) language assessment sessions. 102 of these children returned for sessions in the second year of the study (2019-2020), due to the COVID-19 pandemic 46 of these sessions were conducted F2F and 56 via telehealth. We examined change in receptive vocabulary scores in both languages, including the effect of the language spoken in the home. Results: Using multi-level models analysis, we predicted the raw scores for receptive vocabulary in each language including fixed effects for age, delivery, language spoken at home, and diagnostic classification and random effects for child. Results suggest that only age and diagnostic classification were significant predictors for receptive vocabulary in both languages. Conclusion: Results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic did not adversely impact children’s receptive vocabulary growth. Perhaps children were able to adapt from face-to-face learning to online learning for receptive vocabulary regardless of language spoken at home through other forms of exposure. It seems that suspension of learning due to COVID-19 was not long enough to impact receptive vocabulary growth. However, receptive vocabulary may be less sensitive to loss than other language measures not explored in this study.