Spanish Bilingual Morphosyntactic Development in Bilingual Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder: Articles, Clitics, Verbs, and the Subjunctive Mood

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the growth of previously established clinical markers of developmental language disorder (DLD) in Spanish-speaking bilingual children with and without DLD.

Method: Forty-three bilingual children with DLD and 57 typically developing children were tested 3 times over a 2-year period. Their average age at Time 1 was 5;10 (years;months). All children completed an elicitation task examining the production of articles, clitics, verbs, and the subjunctive mood in Spanish at each time point, in addition to other behavioral testing in Spanish and English. We used growth curve analysis to examine change patterns of the morphosyntactic structures over time.

Results: At the onset of the study, children without DLD produced higher accuracy rates than children with DLD across all morphosyntactic structures. In addition, there was a positive effect of time on all structures. Furthermore, the interaction between time and DLD was statistically significant for clitic pronouns.

Conclusion: In agreement with previous literature on language growth in monolingual children with DLD, bilingual children with DLD showed language growth that was parallel to that of bilingual children without DLD but with significantly lower levels of attainment.

Supplemental material and presentation video: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23810820.

Figure 1.

Classification criteria. The diagram represents the classification categorization. Yellow represents children who qualified from the speech-language pathology services indicator. Green represents children who qualified from the standardized assessments indicator. Blue represents children who qualified from the language samples indicator. Black represents children who did not qualify under any indicator. Multiple circles indicate overlapping indicators.

Figure 2.

Predicted growth curves for probability of correct responses by item type, language status classification, and age at the onset of the study. AgeG = group-centered age predictor for participants at the onset of the study. AgeG = 0, participants of average age at the onset of the study, 5.83 years old. AgeG = −1, participants one year younger than the average age at the onset of the study, 4.83 years old. AgeG = 1, participants one year older than the average age at the onset of the study, 6.83 years old. DLD = developmental language disorder; TD = typical development.

Figure 3.

Individual predicted growth curves over time by item type and language status. DLD = developmental language disorder; TD = typical development.