English Tense/Agreement Measures as Potential Diagnostic Markers in Spanish-English Bilinguals with Developmental Language Disorder

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.