In anticipation of her guest appearance on our BLLING-SLP podcast, the research team spent some time reviewing a couple of papers by Dr. Fabiano - Smith. Happy reading!
Diagnostic accuracy of traditional measures of phonological ability for bilingual preschoolers and kindergarteners. (Fabiano-Smith & Hoffman, 2018).
This study investigates the diagnostic accuracy of the Percent Consonants Correct-Revised (PCC-R, Shriberg et al, 1997) and early-, middle-, late-developing sounds (EML, Shriberg, 1993) for differentiating typical from disordered speech in Spanish-English speaking children. (PCC-R and EML are traditional measures developed for and validated on monolingual English children. Therefore, it is important to explore if use of these measures with Spanish-English speaking children increases risk of misdiagnosis).
Significant differences were not found between any of the groups for PCC-R. Several limitations contribute to cautionary interpretation of the findings. For example, the bilingual participants as a whole demonstrated balanced phonological skills which is not reflective of the bilingual community. Additionally, levels of blinding were not discussed.
This study provides preliminary evidence to support the use of the PCC-R with Spanish-English speaking children at the age of 5. Cut-off scores to ensure sensitivity and specificity are provided.
The participants were grouped by language and diagnosis: 14 typically developing bilingual children, 8 bilingual children with phonological disorders, 15 typically developing monolingual English children, and 7 monolingual English children with phonological disorders.
Initial consonant deletion in bilingual Spanish-English speaking children with speech sound disorders. (Fabiano-Smith & Cuzner, 2017).
This study explores the use of a theoretical framework, the Processing Rich Information from Multidimensional Interactive Representations (PRIMIR, Curtin, Byers-Heinlein, & Werker, 2011), to accurately identify cross-linguistic influence from errors indicating an underlying speech sound disorder in preschool children.
Monolingual Spanish speaking children were unavailable for comparison but children with both speech and language impairments were included in this study. Additionally, only one phonological process was examined. Several measures were used to gather data on current performance (e.g., percentage of occurrence, PCC-R, vowel accuracy, phonetic inventory complexity, intelligibility) and used, in conjunction with the PRIMIR model, to demonstrate cross-linguistic interactions.
This study provides exploratory evidence to support cross-linguistic effects in developing phonological skills. Specifically, monolingual English and Spanish-English speaking children differed significantly in their English patterns, but bilingual children did not differ significantly between their languages. This finding is suggestive of one language’s phonological skills being utilized in the other language.
8 bilingual and 5 monolingual English speaking children with speech sound disorders between the ages of 3.25 – 4.75 years participated in this study.
References
Fabiano-Smith, L. & Cuzner, S.L. (2017). Initial consonant deletion in bilingual Spanish-English speaking children with speech sound disorders. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics. 32(4): 392-410. DOI: 10.1080/02699206.2017.1367037
Fabiano-Smith, L. & Hoffman, K. (2018). Diagnostic accuracy of traditional measures of phonological ability for bilingual preschoolers and Kindergarteners. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 49(1): 121-134. DOI: 10.1044/2017_LSHSS-17-0043
