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DEVELOPMENTAL MEASURES OF MORPHOSYNTACTIC ACQUISITION IN
MONOLINGUAL 3-, 4-, AND 5-YEAR-OLD SPANISH-SPEAKING CHILDREN
by
Anny Patricia Castilla
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Ph.D.
Department of Speech-Language Pathology
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Anny Patricia Castilla (2008)
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Developmental Measures of Morphosyntactic Acquisition in Monolingual 3-, 4-, and 5-Year-Old Spanish-Speaking Children
Anny Patricia Castilla
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Speech Language Pathology
University of Toronto
2008
ABSTRACT
This research investigated aspects of the morphosyntactic language development of 115 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old monolingual Spanish-speaking preschool children who resided in Cali, Colombia.
Two general language measures were collected from the children: a standardized receptive vocabulary measure (Test de Vocabulario en Imágenes, TVIP), and a parental report of speech and language problems. In addition, morphosyntactic measures of language development were obtained using both a story retelling and an elicitation task. Developmental language measures such as number of T-units (NU-TU), mean length of T-units (MLTU), subordination index
(SUB-I), and grammatical errors per T-unit (GRE-TU) were derived from the narratives.
Percentages of correct use of direct and indirect object pronouns, reflexive pronouns, definite articles, indefinite articles, adjectives and plurals were obtained from an elicitation task that was specifically designed for this study. Counts of use of these grammatical structures were also calculated from the narratives.
There were no statistically significant differences between the three age groups on standard scores for the TVIP or scores for the parent questionnaires, indicating that the three age groups were comparable. For the developmental language measures there was an increasing iii developmental pattern for NU-TU, MLTU and SUB-I, but no changes were found for GRE-TU.
Statistically significant changes for the productive use of the grammatical structures of interest to this study were almost always seen between 3 and 4 years of age. Adult use of these grammatical structures was always statistically significantly more correct than child productions. This investigation provides novel normative data for NU-TU, MLTU, SUB-I and GRE-TU for preschool children. This investigation also offers original data on the productive use of object pronouns, articles, adjectives and plurals across the preschool years. The language battery used in this investigation proved to be sensitive to developmental changes between 3 and 4-5 year olds and has the potential to be used as an eventual diagnostic tool for the identification of children with language disorders. Speech-language pathologists who work with Spanish- speaking children will be able to use this normative information to conduct more objective language assessments. iv
A la memoria de mi abuelo, el hombre más sabio que ha existido en mi mundo.
To the memory of my grandfather, the wisest man in my world.
A mi papá, quien nunca dudó que yo podía y quien me dio alas para volar. Sin él yo no sería la persona quien soy hoy.
To my dad, who never doubted that I could do it and who gave me wings so I could fly. Without him I wouldn’t be who I am. v
AKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my most profound gratitude to those who supported me during this journey:
! To the members of my supervisory committee, Dr. Alice Eriks-Brophy, Dr. Carla Johnson, and Dr. Ana Teresa Perez-Leroux for their invaluable guidance during the design, implementation and analysis of this dissertation. Particularly, to Dr. Alice Eriks- Brophy for her personal and professional support during my doctorate studies and for the time and effort dedicated to review the multiple versions of this manuscript. To Dr. Ana Teresa Perez-Leroux for her help with the design of the Elicitation Task and for awakening the linguist in me. To Dr. Carla Johnson for her essential insights on methodological design that made this investigation unique.
! To Dr. Maria Adelaida Restrepo for all previous interesting discussions that originated this dissertation.
! To all the children who participated in this study and who shared not only their language with me but also their precious smiles.
! To my family, who although they were far away physically, were always in my heart.
! To my dear friends Melanie, Heidi, and Santiago for all the love and support they gave me during this process. They made my life easier and happier.
! To God, for giving me the opportunity of spending five years of my life doing something absolutely enjoyable…I did truly enjoy and love every moment of it. vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of tables and figures
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………. ii
Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………. v
1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………… 1
2. Grammatical errors of Italian-, French-, and Spanish-speaking children with SLI………………………………………………………………………………. 5
2.1 Specific language impairment overview……………………………….. 6 2.2 Research on Italian-, French-, and Spanish-Speaking Children with SLI 8 2.2.1 Articles …………………………………………………………. 9 2.2.2 Clitic pronouns……………………………………….…………. 14 2.2.3 Verb inflections…………………………….…………………… 18 2.2.4 Auxiliaries avere and essere……………………………………. 21 2.2.5 Noun-plural agreement…………………………………….…… 21 2.2.6 Adjective agreement……………………………………..……... 22 2.2.7 Subject-verb number agreement………………………………... 23 2.2.8 Prepositions…………………………………………………….. 23 2.3 Summary of grammatical manifestation of SLI in Italian, French and Spanish…………………………………………………………………. 24 2.4 Further research in Spanish-speaking children with SLI………………. 28
3. Language assessment in monolingual and bilingual children……………….. 31
4. Spanish language acquisition………………………………………………… 37
4.1. Spanish grammatical structures overview.…………………………….. 38 4.1.1. Noun phrase agreement…………………………………………. 38 4.1.2. Clitic pronouns………………………………………………….. 39 4.2. Research on morphosyntactic Spanish acquisition…………………….. 41 4.2.1. Articles………………………………………………………….. 42 4.2.2. Object Clitic pronouns………………………………………….. 43 4.2.3. Noun- adjective agreement……………………………………... 43 4.2.4. Plural inflection………………………………………………… 44 4.2.5. Summary of acquisition of grammatical structures…………….. 45 4.3. Research on developmental measures…………………………………. 45
5. Purpose and questions………………………………………………………... 48 vii
6. Method……………………………………………………………………… 50
6.1 Participants...... 51 6.2 Measures ...... 54 6.2.1 Parent questionnaire...... 55 6.2.2 Test de Vocabulario en Imagenes Peabody (TVIP)...... 56 6.2.3 Language sample...... 56 6.2.4 Elicitation Task...... …...... 58 6.3 Procedures...... ……...... 61 6.4 Reliability...... 62
7. Results and discussion……………………………………………………… 64
7.1.1 Test de Vocabulario en Imagenes TVIP………………………….. 64 7.1.2 Parent questionnaires……………………………………………… 65 7.1.3. Discussion of the results from the TVIP and parent questionnaire. 67 7.2 Developmental language measures……………………………………… 71 7.2.1 Number of T-Units………………………………………………. 72 7.2.2 Mean Length of T-Units…………………………………………. 73 7.2.3 Subordination Index……………………………………………... 74 7.2.4 Grammatical errors per T-unit…………………………………… 75 7.2.5 Summary of developmental language measures based on spontaneous Language………………………………………….…………………… 76 7.2.6 Discussion of developmental language measures……………….. 77 7.3 Acquisition of Grammatical Structures…………………………………. 84 7.3.1 Direct object pronouns…………………………………………... 86 7.3.2 Reflexive pronouns…………………………………………….... 88 7.3.3 Indirect object pronouns…………………………………….…… 91 7.3.4 Adjectives……………………………………………………….. 93 7.3.5 Indefinite articles………………………………………………... 95 7.3.6 Definite articles…………………………………………………. 98 7.3.7 Plurals…………………………………………………………… 100 7.3.8 Elicitation Task Total Score ………………………………………. 103 7.3.9 Summary of Results…………………………………………….. 104 7.3.10 Discussion of development of grammatical structures……….. 106
8. Implications and further directions………………………………………….. 117
8.1 Limitations……………………………………………………………… 128 8.2 Further directions………………………………………………………. 129 8.3 Contributions…………………………………………………………… 130
References……………………………………………………………………… 132 Appendix 1. Parent questionnire (Spanish version)……………………………. 140 Appendix 2. Parent questionnaire (English version)…………………………… 143 Appendix 3. Story retelling task script ……… ……………………..………….. 146 viii
Appendix 4. Language sample coding scheme. ………………………………… 148 Appendix 5. Elicitation task …………………….……………………………… 151 Appendix 6. Consent forms and assent script…………………………….…….. 160 Appendix 7 Direct object clitics……………………………………………….. 164 Appendix 7. Reflexives ………………..………………………………………. 166 Appendix 8. Adjectives…………………………………………………………. 167 Appendix 9. Indefinite articles…………………………………………………. 168 Appendix 10. Definite articles………………………………………………….. 170 Appendix 11. Correlation table controlling for Age.………………………….. 172 ix
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
Table 1. Spanish, French, and Italian definite and indefinite articles………… 9 Table 2. Spanish, French, and Italian object clitic pronouns…………………. 15 Table 3. Grammatical errors in Italian-speaking children with SLI………….. 26 Table 4. Grammatical errors in French-speaking children with SLI…………. 27 Table 5. Grammatical errors in Spanish-speaking children with SLI………... 28 Table 6. Spanish definite and indefinite articles……………………………… 39 Table 7. Spanish clitic pronouns……………………………………………… 40 Table 8. Acquisition of grammatical structures……………………..………. 45 Table 9. Means and Standard Deviations (in parentheses) for Developmental Language Measures………………………………………………….………… 47 Table 10. Grammatical structures for the elicitation task ……………………. 60 Table 11. Point to point reliability………………………………………….… 63 Table 12. Descriptive statistics for standard scores in TVIP………………… 64 Table 13. Frequency data by age group for the PRSLP ……….…………….. 67 Table 14. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for NU-TU………..…….... 73 Table 15. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for MLTU………..……..... 74 Table 16. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for SUB-I………………… 75 Table 17. Descriptive Statistics for Developmental Language Measures…… 77 Table 18. Comparison of Means and Standard Deviations for Developmental Language Measures……………………………………………………….... 79 Table 19. Descriptive Statistics for Direct Object Pronoun Use – Spontaneous Language …………………………………………………………………….. 87 Table 20. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Direct Object Pronouns 88 Table 21. Descriptive Statistics for Reflexive Pronouns -Spontaneous Language 90 Table 22. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Reflexive Pronouns……. 90 Table 23. Descriptive Statistics for Indirect Object Pronouns - Spontaneous Language…………………………………………………………………… 92 Table 24. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Indirect Object Pronouns… 93 x
Table 25. Descriptive Statistics for Adjective Use - Spontaneous Language…….. 94 Table 26. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Adjectives………………… 95 Table 27. Descriptive Statistics for Indefinite Article Use - Spontaneous Language 97 Table 28. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Indefinite Articles………….. 98 Table 29. Descriptive Statistics for Definite Article Use - Spontaneous Language… 99 Table 30. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Definite Articles…………….. 100 Table 31. Descriptive Statistics for Plurals - Spontaneous Language………………. 102 Table 32. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Plurals………………………. 102 Table 33. Descriptive Statistics for Total Elicitation Task………………………… 103 Table 34. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Total Score on the Elicitation task…………………………………………………………………………………. 104 Table 35. Summary of Group Comparison Results……………………………….. 105 Table 36. Summary of Findings for Grammatical Structures…………………….. 107
Figure 1. Chronological age box plot……………………………………………….. 51 Figure 2. Pie chart of number of children per school independent of SES………… 53 Figure 3. Pie chart of percentage of children per SES………………………………. 53 Figure 4. TVIP standard score distribution per age group…………………………… 65 Figure 5. Means and two SD for PRSLP across age groups……………………..…… 66 Figure 6. Mean performance for NU-TU for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old SS children ……. 73 Figure 7. Mean performance for MLTU for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old SS children…….. 74 Figure 8. Mean performance for SUB-I for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old SS children…….. 75 Figure 9. Mean performance for GRE-TU for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old SS children….. 76 Figure 10. Means and standard deviations of direct object pronoun use- Elicited language………………………………………………………………………………. 87 Figure 11. Means and SD bars for direct object pronouns- Spontaneous language….. 88 Figure 12. Means and SD for reflexive pronoun use- Elicited language…………….. 89 Figure 13. Mean and SD bars for reflexive pronoun use– Spontaneous language…… 90 Figure 14. Means and SD for indirect object pronoun use- Elicited language…..…… 91 Figure 15. Mean and SD bars for indirect object pronoun use – Spontaneous language 92 xi
Figure 16. Means and SD for adjective use- Elicited language……………………… 94 Figure 17. Mean and SD bars for adjective use - Spontaneous language…………… 95 Figure 18. Means and SD for indefinite article use- Elicited language……………… 96 Figure 19. Mean and SD bars for indefinite article use– Spontaneous language…… 97 Figure 20. Means and SD for definite article use- Elicited language………………... 99 Figure 21. Mean and SD bars for definite article use– Spontaneous language……… 100 Figure 22. Means and SD for plural use - Elicited language……………………….. 101 Figure 23. Mean and SD bars for plural use– Spontaneous language……………… 102 Figure 24. Means and SD for the total score on the Elicitation Task ……………… 103 1
1. INTRODUCTION
Assessment in multicultural and multilingual contexts has recently been a topic of interest to clinicians and researchers who work in countries where multiple languages are spoken ,as is the case for Canada. French and English are both official languages in this country, but a variety of languages are also spoken due to an increase in immigration in the last three decades. A good example of multilingualism of Canada is the city of Toronto, where it is not surprising to hear many different languages being used in everyday life. The Canadian Census of 2001 reported that 39% of the population of Toronto spoke a non-official language as a first language, with
Chinese being the largest language group, followed by Italian, Portuguese, Punjabi and Spanish.
Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working in this type of multilingual context encounter a challenging task in providing appropriate services for this linguistically diverse population.
In 1997, the Canadian Association of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologist
(CASLPA) developed a position statement regarding SLPs working in multicultural and multilingual contexts. One of the most important points in this document was the need to assess both the first and second language of the bilingual child (Crago & Westernoff, 1997). Although this is very important to ensure appropriate assessment of bilingual children, it poses some interesting challenges for SLPs. Consider the example of a Spanish-English bilingual child who needs to have his language skills assessed. To deliver services to this child and assess him in
Spanish and English, CASLPA suggests using bilingual and bicultural SLPs or a group of collaborators who are able to communicate in the language(s) of interest. However, the challenge is not only to find a bilingual Spanish-English SLP or a Spanish-speaking collaborator, 2 but also to find linguistically appropriate assessment tools to adequately identify language disorders in Spanish-speaking children.
Paul (2001) defined a language disorder as a “significant deficit in learning to talk, understand, or use any aspect of language appropriately, relative to both environmental and norm-referenced expectations for children of similar developmental level (p. 3)”. According to this definition, it is essential to have access to norm-referenced language information to administer proper language assessments and accurately diagnose language disorders. Normative information and linguistically appropriate assessments are widely available for English-speaking children. However, this is not the case for other languages, including Spanish. Research on language assessment, language acquisition, and normative developmental data for Spanish- speaking (SS) children continue to be very limited.
Fortunately, in the case of Spanish, there is some information available on disordered language. A few researchers have attempted to describe the morphosyntactic characteristics of
SS children with specific language impairment (SLI) (e.g., Bedore & Leonard, 2001, 2005;
Restrepo, 1998). Restrepo (1998) investigated SLI in SS children and suggested that these children showed significant differences in performance on developmental language measures such as mean length of terminable units (T-unit; an independent clause plus all its modifiers;
Hunt, 1965) and number of grammatical errors per terminable unit when compared to typically developing children. Although these measures appear to have a clinical value for SLPs, the normative information available on these measures is limited.
Returning to our Spanish-English bilingual example, Restrepo (1998) suggests that mean length of T-units can differentiate between typically developing children and children with language disorders. Therefore, the Spanish-speaking SLP collects language data from our child 3 and calculates this measure. Unfortunately, this information will serve only as a description of the child’s language because there are no normative data on this measure that can be used to provide an adequate comparison.
Other researchers suggest that SS children with SLI also demonstrate difficulties with specific grammatical structures such as articles, clitic object pronouns, adjectives and plurals
(Bedore & Leonard, 2001; Gutierrez-Clellen, Restrepo, Bedore, Peña, & Anderson, 2000;
Jacobson & Schwartz, 2002; Restrepo & Gutierrez-Clellen, 2004). However, only limited information is available on the development of these grammatical structures in typically developing SS children. Several authors have reported the scarcity of research on the acquisition of Spanish (e.g., Anderson, 1998; Bedore, 2004; Centeno, Anderson & Obler, 2007). This information is needed in order to provide accurate assessment and diagnosis of language disorders in monolingual and bilingual SS children.
The present study was conceived as a possible source of information to help SLPs in the complex task of assessing morphosyntax in monolingual and bilingual SS children. SLPs who work in monolingual and multilingual contexts will benefit by having information on the language development of SS children that can be used in the assessment and possible identification of language disorders. Child language researchers can also benefit from this information by potentially using it to make cross linguistic comparisons of language development.
This study is supported by various areas of knowledge that are closely related to morphosyntactic language assessment in monolingual and bilingual SS children. The information presented in the following three chapters provides the reader with background knowledge on SLI in Romance languages, language assessment in monolingual and bilingual 4 children, the grammar of the Spanish language, morphosyntactic Spanish language acquisition, and developmental language measures in Spanish-speaking children. Chapter 2 will cover the grammatical structures that have been found to be problematic for Italian-, French-, and Spanish- speaking children. This chapter is presented first because it justifies the selection of the grammatical structures of interest to this study. Chapter 3 will cover background information on language assessment in monolingual and bilingual children. Chapter 4 will cover specific findings on language development and developmental measures for Spanish-speaking children and will serve as the source of information for the hypotheses presented in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 will present the methods of the study and Chapter 7 will present the results and discussion.
Finally, Chapter 8 will discuss the general implications of this study and will show possibilities for further research directions. 5
2. GRAMMATICAL ERRORS OF ITALIAN-, FRENCH-, AND SPANISH-
SPEAKING CHILDREN WITH SLI
Cross-linguistic research in SLI has significantly increased over the past two decades. The growing interest in this line of research stems from both clinical and theoretical perspectives.
Clinically, such research provides useful data for the assessment and treatment of children with SLI across different languages. Theoretically, it provides data to examine the various accounts that attempt to explain the underlying deficits of children with SLI across languages.
Research in SLI has been mainly conducted in English, Italian, French, Spanish,
German, Dutch, and Hebrew. The languages of interest to this research are Italian, French, and
Spanish. These languages are called Romance languages because they originated from Latin, the language of the Romans. Romance languages have many similar characteristics, both in terms of grammar and vocabulary, because of their common origin. To study a group of languages to investigate similarities and differences among them is one among a number of approaches to cross-linguistic research (Jakubowicz, 1996).
The purpose of this chapter is to survey the research on grammatical structures that are problematic for Italian-, French-, and Spanish-speaking children with SLI. In addition, this review aims to examine the research in Italian and French, looking for potential areas of interest for further research on Spanish SLI. Although various accounts have been proposed to explain the grammatical difficulties that will be described in this chapter, its purpose is not to examine these accounts or to find evidence supporting any specific explanation. Although this is a very interesting topic of study, it is beyond the scope of the present research. 6 2.1. Specific Language Impairment Overview
Children with SLI experience significant limitations in language ability that can not be explained by neurological dysfunction, hearing loss, oral motor problems, deficits in nonverbal intelligence, or other known factors (Leonard, 1998). The prevalence rate of SLI has been estimated to be 7.4% in monolingual English-speaking kindergarten children
(Tomblin, Records, Buckwalter, Zhang, Smith & O’Brien, 1997). Boys have a prevalence rate of 8% compared to girls whose rate is 6% (Tomblin et al., 1997). SLI is considered to be a persistent disorder and, although gains in language ability are usually seen over time, the language difficulties often remain throughout adolescence and adulthood (Leonard, 1998).
Limitations in the language ability of children with SLI have been described as consisting of difficulties in lexical learning, phonology, pragmatics, and, particularly, morphosyntax (Leonard, 1998). Two primary lines of research have tried to explain the underlying deficit of children with SLI: those focusing on limited processing capacity accounts and those emphasizing linguistic accounts. Limited processing accounts claim that a deficit in processing abilities influences children’s language acquisition due to limitations in either memory, energy, or rate at which information can be processed, or some combination of these that is necessary to perform a given task. For example, Leonard proposed the Surface
Hypothesis Account (Leonard, 1998). This account claims that not all information can be processed efficiently because of a limitation in processing capacity, and as a result processing focuses more on the most salient characteristics of the input and less on the least salient forms.
The less salient forms are sometimes processed incompletely and, consequently, more 7 exposure to these forms is required before they are established in the grammar (Leonard,
1998).
Linguistic accounts attempt to explain the grammatical difficulties seen in children with SLI in a number of different ways. Some accounts claim that the language development of children with SLI is delayed. For example, the Extended Optional Infinitive Account
(Rice, Wexler, & Cleave, 1995) suggests that children remain in an earlier stage of development where they use infinitive forms and do not mark tense. On the other hand, other accounts claim that there is a specific deficit in the linguistic knowledge of children with SLI.
For example, the Missing Agreement Account (Clahsen & Hansen, 1993) proposes that children with SLI have a specific deficit in producing correct structural agreements. Although linguistic accounts differ on whether the underlying problem is a developmental delay or a deficit in linguistic knowledge, they all convey the notion of a lack of age-appropriate knowledge of the rules of the linguistic system.
Manifestations of the lack of age-appropriate linguistic knowledge are not parallel across languages. For example, English-speaking children with SLI show particular difficulties with copula (be) forms, present tense third person singular verb inflections, and regular past tense verb inflections (Leonard, 1998). These verb inflection problems are not necessarily seen across languages. In fact, in some languages, including Spanish, children with SLI seem to have minor difficulties with verb inflections as compared to the difficulties seen in certain function words (Bedore & Leonard, 2001). 8 2.2. Research on Italian-, French-, and Spanish-Speaking Children with SLI
Examinations of SLI in Italian, French and Spanish differ with respect to the amount of research available on each language. Research in Italian speaking children began in the
1980’s, and thus a considerable amount of research in this language is available. In contrast, a limited number of studies are available on Spanish and French, as research on these languages is more recent. The research on Italian comes from Italy, research on French comes from
France and Québec (Canada) and research on Spanish comes from the United States, Spain,
Mexico and Puerto Rico. Interestingly, some of the evidence of grammatical difficulties in
Spanish-speaking children stems from contexts where Spanish is a minority language. It is possible that the majority language, which would be the second language, has an impact on the first language skills of the children. Therefore, results from contexts where a majority language exists that is different from the one being studied should be interpreted with caution.
The research in this section is organized according to grammatical structures. Each grammatical structure is reviewed in light of the three languages of interest. Research in
Italian is presented first, followed by French and then Spanish. Overviews of the similarities and differences in the grammatical structures are presented at the beginning of the article and clitic sections. Results from elicited and spontaneous language are presented for each grammatical structure when such information is available. It is possible that children will perform differently in these two types of tasks because in an elicited language task, children are obliged to use a specific grammatical structure that they might not produce or might avoid in spontaneous language. 9 Research in SLI is commonly characterized by group comparisons of language abilities of children with SLI and typically developing children. These typically developing children can be either age-peers (children matched on chronological age) or language-peers (children matched on their performance on a specific language measure). On one hand, age-peers provide information to be able to identify a delay in the development of language abilities. On the other side, language-peers provide information to identify a possible deviant pattern that can not be explained by delays in language development. The research examined in the upcoming sections frequently use a comparison group matched on either age or language skills, or sometimes both.
2.2.1. Articles
The article systems of Italian, French and Spanish are very similar. In these languages, nouns have grammatical gender (feminine/masculine). Articles must agree with nouns in number and gender. Italian is different in that more than one article form is available depending on the initial sound of the word that follows the article (see Table 1).
Table 1. Spanish, French, and Italian Definite and Indefinite Articles Articles Feminine Feminine Masculine Masculine Singular Plural Singular Plural Spanish Definite la las lo los Indefinite una unas un unos French Definite la les le les Indefinite une des un des Italian Definite La/l’a le il/lob/l’a i/glic Indefinite Uno b/un una/un’ b NOTE. a Used when subsequent word begins with vowel. b Used when subsequent word begins with /z/ or /s/ cluster. c Used when subsequent word begins with vowel, /z/ or /s/ cluster 10
Italian-speaking (IS) children with SLI have difficulties with articles as evidenced in both elicited and spontaneous language. For example, Bortolini, Caselli and Leonard (1997) studied the use of singular definite articles by IS children with SLI using an elicitation task.
They reported that IS children with SLI produced 51% correct articles compared to typically developing (TD) children matched on mean length of utterance (MLU ) and chronological age, who produced 85.67% and 88.33%, respectively. Similarly, Leonard, Bortolini, Caselli, and Sabbadini (1993) compared IS children with SLI to typically developing (TD) children on the production of singular definite articles using a picture description task. They found that children in the TD group had higher percentages of use of these articles in obligatory contexts than did IS children with SLI.
Evidence from spontaneous language comes from studies such as Leonard, Sabbadini,
Volterra, and Leonard (1988), who studied spontaneous language samples of IS children with
SLI. They reported that these children showed difficulties with the use of definite and indefinite articles when compared to data obtained from TD children. Also based on language samples, Leonard and Bortolini (1998) reported that IS children with SLI differed significantly from the TD children matched on MLU in their correct use of articles. The percentage of use in obligatory contexts for the SLI group was 68% and for the TD group was
84.33%.
Longitudinal studies also show that IS children with SLI have difficulties with articles. For example, Cipriani, Botarri, Chilosi and Pfanner (1998) followed the language development of an IS child with SLI. Language samples were collected during conversation, 11 free play and book reading. Articles were slow to develop in the language of this child, with percentages of correct production between 2% and 19% between the ages of 6;2 and 8;9.
The grammatical error type reported as the most frequent for IS children in both elicited and spontaneous language is the omission of the article (Bortolini et al. 1997; Botarri,
Cipriani, Chilosi & Pfanner, 1998, 2001; Cipriani et al., 1998; Leonard & Bortolini, 1998).
The research reported difficulty for the SLI children with the definite singular masculine form il (Leonard, Bortolini, Caselli, & Sabbadini, 1993; Leonard et al., 1988) and the indefinite singular masculine articles form un (Leonard et al, 1988). The difference between IS children with SLI and TD children in the use of definite singular masculine forms was reportedly quite large. For example, Leonard, Bortolini, Caselli, and Sabbadini (1993) reported that the definite singular masculine form il was used correctly 26.7% of the time and the form lo was used correctly 21.13% of the time compared to TD children with percentages of correct use of
82.68% and 77.27% respectively.
Data from the previous studies show that IS children with SLI have difficulties with definite and indefinite articles. These errors are mainly characterized by omission of the articles. The masculine definite singular form is the most affected article in Italian. In addition, articles are omitted significantly more often by IS children with SLI than any other grammatical structure (Botarri, Cipriani, Chilosi & Pfanner, 1998, 2001).
Interestingly, French-speaking (FS) children with SLI seem not to have difficulties with articles, in contrast to what is seen in Italian (Jakubowicz, Nash, Rigaut, & Gérard, 1998;
Le Normand, Leonard, & McGregor, 1993; Paradis & Crago, 2001). For example,
Jakubowicz, et al. (1998) studied the production of definite articles from children with SLI 12 and TD children using an elicitation task. They reported no differences between FS children with SLI and TD in the use of definite articles. Data from spontaneous language samples seem to point in the same direction. Paradis and Crago (2001) studied spontaneous language samples from FS children with SLI and two groups with TD matched on MLU and age. Their findings suggested that children with SLI did not differ from normally developing age-, and
MLU-matched children with TD in their use of definite and indefinite articles in obligatory contexts. Moreover, Le Normand, et al. (1993) studied spontaneous language and reported similar results. Thus there is no available evidence that FS children with SLI have difficulties with articles in either spontaneous or elicited language.
Conversely, Spanish-speaking (SS) children with SLI have difficulties with articles evidenced in both spontaneous and elicited language. Restrepo and Gutierrez-Clellen (2001) studied language samples of children with SLI and TD, aged 5;0 to 7;1 and matched on age.
They investigated the production of article errors and found significant differences between children with SLI and TD the number of article errors, where children with TD exhibited a mean of 2.8% of article errors and children with SLI produced a mean of 22.3% article errors.
Examining spontaneous language as well as elicited language, Bedore and Leonard
(2001, 2005) studied 15 SS children with SLI and two groups of 15 TD children matched on age or MLU. These authors found significant differences in the percentage of use of definite and indefinite articles in obligatory contexts when compared to TD children matched on age using an elicitation task (Bedore & Leonard, 2001). They obtained the same difference for definite articles using spontaneous language samples (Bedore & Leonard, 2005). Similarly,
Anderson and Souto (2005) studied the use of articles by SS children with SLI and TD 13 matched on age using both an elicitation task and a language sample. They found that 4- and 5- year-old SS children with SLI differed from TD children in the accuracy of article production in both the elicitation task (SLI 64.3% and TD 95.5%) and the language sample
(SLI 85.4% and TD 98.4%). Although the mean accuracy rate for SS children with SLI was significantly lower than for the TD children, most of the children were quite accurate in the production of articles in spontaneous language.
As was the case with IS children, the article error type most frequently reported in SS children with SLI is the omission of the article (Anderson & Souto, 2005; Bedore & Leonard,
2001, 2005, Bosch & Serra, 1997) followed by article substitution errors (Restrepo &
Gutierrez-Clellen, 2001). Substitution errors are reported as gender agreement errors
(Anderson & Souto, 2005; Restrepo & Gutierrez-Clellen, 2001) and number agreement errors
(Bedore & Leonard, 2001). Data on the gender agreement errors are inconclusive. Restrepo and Gutierrez-Clellen (2001) reported that agreement errors consisted primarily of substitutions of definite masculine articles for definite feminine articles. However, Anderson and Souto (2005) reported agreement errors on both masculine and feminine articles. Number agreement errors were reported as consisting of plural forms replaced by the singular form of the same gender (Bedore & Leonard, 2001). Errors in the definite form were found to be significantly greater than errors in the indefinite form (Restrepo & Gutierrez-Clellen, 2001).
In summary, the data from studies of Spanish show that children with SLI have difficulties with definite and indefinite articles similar to those found in IS children with SLI.
Omission of the articles is the error type most frequently reported in both Spanish and Italian, 14 although gender and number errors have been reported in Spanish. Further research is needed to determine whether a specific set of articles is particularly affected.
Due to the commonalities in the article system among the three languages under review, one would expect to find similar cross-linguistic error patterns. Surprisingly, FS children with SLI do not appear to show any difficulties with this structure. There are two possible explanations for this phenomenon. First, French articles are syntactically more obligatory than articles in Italian and Spanish. For some expressions, Italian and Spanish articles are optional, while the article is required for French. For example, in the Spanish sentence /los niños juegan con carros / the children play with cars/, the noun cars does not require a determiner. The same sentence in French requires an obligatory determiner /les enfants jouent avec les autos/. Perhaps the fact that the use of the article is more regular and frequent makes it easier for French speaking children to learn it. Another possible explanation is a cross linguistic difference in stress patterns. Spanish, Italian and French articles are unstressed; however, it has been hypothesized that the duration of French articles is very similar to the duration of stressed morphemes, making them perceptually similar to stressed morphemes and therefore more potentially accessible (Le Normand et al., 1993).
2.2.2. Clitic pronouns
Clitic pronouns are free morphemes that must occur adjacent to the verb. The clitic pronoun systems in Italian, French and Spanish are also very similar. Italian, French and Spanish clitic pronoun systems are very rich because object pronouns must agree with the nouns they replace in number and gender (See Table 2). 15 Table 2. Spanish, French, and Italian Object Clitic Pronouns French Italian Spanish Person Singular Plural Singular Plural Singular Plural 1st me nous mi ci Me nos 2nd te vous ti vi Te os 3rd Masculine le les lo li lo los 3rd Feminine la les la le la las 3rd Masculine dative lui leur gli loro Le les 3rd Feminine dative lui leur le loro Le les 3rd Reflexive se se si si Se se
Research on IS children with SLI suggests that these children have difficulties with clitic pronouns, as evidenced in spontaneous language. Although few studies have been conducted on clitic pronouns in Italian, the results are consistent. For example, Cipriani et al.
(1998) followed the language development of an Italian-speaking child with SLI. The child under investigation produced 18% to 50% clitic pronouns in obligatory contexts between the age of 6;2 and 9;4 in spontaneous language. Clitics only appeared in present tense contexts.
Similarly, Leonard et al. (1988) studied Italian-speaking children with SLI and found that object clitic pronouns in the singular and plural form of the first, second, and third person were used with extremely low frequencies. They claimed that story telling and picture sequence activities were contexts that posed particular difficulty for clitic production.
Also based on data from language samples, Leonard and Bortolini (1998) investigated the use of direct object, indirect object, reflexive, and impersonal subject clitics in obligatory contexts, and found that children with SLI differed significantly from TD children in the production of all clitic pronouns investigated. Unfortunately, no specific differences among the different types of clitic pronouns were reported. This study stands out from the others in that it included direct, indirect, reflexive and impersonal subject clitics in the analysis. 16 Hence, there is evidence that suggests that IS children with SLI show difficulties with clitics. However, the evidence is somewhat limited and further research is needed to confirm the findings. Omission of the clitic is the most common error type reported for clitics for the IS children (Cipriani, et al., 1998; Leornard & Bortonlini, 1998).
There is evidence that suggests that FS children with SLI have difficulties with clitic pronouns as well. Using spontaneous language samples, Hamann, Ohayon, Dubé,
Frauenfelder, Rizzi, Starke and Zesiger (2003) studied the production of object clitic pronouns by FS children with SLI. The researchers reported that these children had a tendency not to use direct object clitics and to use lexical complements instead (e.g., he found the shoes instead of he found them). Children with SLI produced a lexical complement 68% of the time, omitted an object pronoun 11% of the time, and produced an object pronoun 21% of the time in obligatory contexts. Hamman et al. investigated direct and indirect objects, but did not differentiate between them in their analysis.
Using an elicitation task, Grüter (2005) studied the production of object clitic pronouns by FS children with SLI. Grüter reported that FS children with SLI produced a lexical complement 16.5% of the time, omitted an object pronoun 67.2% of the time and produced an object clitic pronoun 7.5% of the time in obligatory contexts, compared to TD children who produced object pronouns 72.6% of the time, omitted an object pronoun 7.4% of the time, and produced a lexical complement 7.4% of the time. The omission rate for this study was much higher than the omission rate reported by Hamann et al. (2003), possibly because of the nature of the task. As previously stated, elicitation tasks induce children to produce a target structure whereas in spontaneous language children produce language within their comfort zone and 17 may avoid certain structures. Perhaps children tend to omit clitic pronouns more often when they are obliged to use them due to task demands.
Also using an elicitation task, Jakubowicz, Nash, Rigaut, and Gérard (1998) studied the production of clitic pronouns of FS children with SLI and TD children. They reported that
FS children with SLI differed significantly from normally developing children in their percentage of correct use of clitic pronouns in obligatory contexts. Jakubowicz et al. specifically investigated direct object, subject and reflexive pronouns and reported that TD FS children between the ages of 5;6 and 5;11 correctly produced 78.7% of object clitic pronouns,
95.6% of reflexive clitic pronouns and 97.8% of subject clitic pronouns. FS children with SLI showed difficulties with the three types of clitics, and significant differences were found between the two groups. The FS SLI group correctly produced 25.2% of direct object clitic pronouns, 56.7% of reflexive clitic pronouns and 75.4% of subject clitic pronouns.
French data suggest that FS children with SLI have difficulties with object pronouns, as evidenced in both spontaneous and elicited language. Additional data from elicited production suggest that these children might have difficulties with subject and reflexive pronouns as well, although more research is needed to confirm these findings. The omission of the pronoun is the most frequent error reported in the above studies.
Research on Spanish has only focused on direct object clitics. Jacobson and Schwartz
(2002) investigated the use of direct object clitic pronouns by a group of SS children with SLI.
They used an elicitation task examining direct object clitic pronouns, and reported that SS children with SLI correctly used direct object clitic pronouns less frequently than TD children.
Also using an elicitation task, De la Mora, Paradis, Grinstead, Flores and Sanchez (2004) 18 studied a group of SS children with SLI and TD children matched on age or MLU. They reported that SS children with SLI made significantly more errors on direct object clitics than
TD children.
Bedore and Leonard (2001, 2005) studied a group of SS children with SLI and two groups of TD children, one matched on chronological age and the other on MLU. Using an elicitation task, Bedore and Leonard found significant differences in the percentage of use of direct object clitics in obligatory contexts between children with SLI and TD children.
Subsequently, Bedore and Leonard (2005) studied language samples produced by the children in the 2001 study. They found that accuracy in use of direct object clitics by children with SLI differed significantly from TD children.
The error types reported as the most frequent in SS children with SLI across languages are gender agreement errors (Bedore & Leonard, 2001, 2005; Jacobson & Schwartz, 2002), omissions (Bedore & Leonard, 2001, 2005; De la Mora, et al., 2004; Jacobson & Schwartz,
2002), and number agreement errors (De la Mora et al., 2004). Interestingly, Italian and
French data suggest omission as a frequent error as well, but do not report other types of errors. Further research is needed in these three languages to confirm the existing findings and expand them to other type of clitics.
2.2.3. Verb inflections
Different types of verb inflection difficulties are seen in children with SLI who speak Italian,
French and Spanish. For example, research on verb inflection in Italian is very consistent in finding difficulties only with the present third person plural inflections as evidenced in 19 spontaneous and elicited language. Evidence from language samples includes Leonard,
Sabbadini, Leonard, and Volterra (1987), who studied present tense third person plural and singular verb inflection from spontaneous language samples of Italian speaking children with
SLI. They reported that these children had difficulties with the third person plural form that is usually acquired by TD children by age three. Similarly, Leonard and Bortolini (1998) studied language samples from a picture description task of 25 children with SLI and 50 TD children matched on MLU or age. They investigated the use of the present tense singular and plural third person verb inflections in obligatory contexts, and found that children with SLI differed significantly from the TD children in the present tense third person plural inflection, but not in the singular form.
Data from elicitation tasks also demonstrate difficulties with third person plural inflections. Bortolini et al. (1997) studied first and third person singular and plural verb inflections of IS children with SLI. Using an elicitation task they found that Italian-speaking children with SLI showed difficulties with the third person plural inflection when compared to
TD children, but not with the other verb inflections examined. The error type reported as the most frequent was the production of the third person singular form instead of the plural form, followed by the substitution of the third person singular form by an infinitive form. This pattern of error was also seen in the Leonard and Bortolini (1998) study.
Although the evidence in Italian is very consistent regarding difficulties with the third person singular form, the evidence of verb inflection difficulties in French is not as conclusive with respect to the type of verb inflection affected. For example, Paradis and Crago (2001) studied spontaneous language samples of French-speaking children with SLI, and two groups 20 of TD children matched for MLU or age and reported that children with SLI showed significant differences in the mean percentage of use of past and future tense when compared to TD children. In a similar way, Jakubowicz and Nash (2001) studied the production of the present tense versus the past tense in FS children with SLI and TD children using an elicitation task. They found that present tense was generally correctly produced, but the past tense was often produced with errors when compared to TD children. However, some of the children in the SLI group did not have difficulties with the past tense. Researchers attributed this difference in performance to the degree of severity of the linguistic deficit. Further research is needed to confirm whether FS children with SLI have difficulties with the future and past tense.
As is the case in French, limited evidence of difficulties with verb inflection is available for Spanish. Bedore and Leonard (2001) are the only researchers who have investigated verb inflection in SS children with SLI. They found significant differences between children with
SLI and TD children matched on age for third person plural present, singular and plural past.
However, these differences did not hold when the same children were compared on the use of these inflections in spontaneous language (Bedore & Leonard, 2005).
Further research is needed to confirm the findings in Spanish and French. The Italian data are robust with respect to findings regarding the third person plural inflection; however, the reason why this inflection is particularly affected remains uncertain. Importantly, it is clear that these children have few problems with verb inflection compared to the difficulties seen in function words such as articles and clitics. Verb inflection difficulty in Italian, French, and 21 Spanish-speaking children with SLI is an area that could benefit from being explored in more detail.
2.2.4. Auxiliaries avere and essere
Research in IS children with SLI shows that auxiliaries are another area of potential difficulty.
Leonard and Bortolini (1998) studied language samples from a picture description task of children with SLI and TD children matched on MLU or age. They investigated the use of the auxiliaries avere/have and essere/be in present perfect (the most frequent form of past tense in
Italian). They found that children with SLI differed significantly from TD children in their use of these auxiliaries in obligatory contexts. Leonard and Bortolini (1998) reported that omission of the auxiliary was the most common error in children with SLI. Unfortunately, this is the only study found in all three languages of interest that investigated these auxiliaries and reported such findings. Further research is needed to expand these results. Studies on auxiliaries in FS and SS children were not available at the time of this review.
2.2.5. Noun-plural agreement
Italian, French and Spanish have similar patterns of inflection to mark plurality. In Italian, if the noun ends in a vowel, there is a change in the final vowel of the noun to indicate plural.
For example, masculine nouns that end in the vowel o, change the final vowel to i and feminine nouns that end in the vowel a change to e to indicate plurality. The nouns ending in e, regardless of whether these nouns are masculine or feminine, change to i . In French, the addition of /s/ indicates the plural form of a noun, although this is rarely pronounced un oral 22 language. In Spanish, plural number is marked by adding /s/ to nouns and adjectives when they end in vowels and /es/ when they end in consonants.
Research on plural noun inflection is very limited for all three languages under review, however there is some evidence that children with SLI have difficulties with this inflection in
Italian and Spanish. Bortolini et al. (1997) studied the use of plural noun inflection by IS children with SLI using an elicitation task. They reported that these children differed significantly from TD children matched on age, but did not differ from the TD children matched on MLU. In Spanish, Bedore and Leonard (2001) found significant differences in the percentage of use of plural inflections on nouns. Spanish speaking children with SLI had a mean percentage of use in obligatory contexts of 55.8% , which was significantly lower than the percentage for TD children matched on MLU (75.1%) or age (95.87%). In a subsequent study, Bedore and Leonard (2005) reported that the accuracy of plural inflections was significantly lower in the SLI group than in the two groups of TD children in spontaneous language, but the SLI group nevertheless had a high accuracy rate of 92.9%. Grammatical errors in both Spanish and Italian were characterized by the plural taking the form of the singular. There was no information for FS children.
2.2.6. Adjective agreement
Adjectives in Italian, French, and Spanish must agree with the noun they refer to in number and gender. However, only research in Spanish SLI has reported difficulties with adjective agreement. Bedore and Leonard (2001) reported that SS children with SLI significantly differed from TD children matched on age or MLU on the percentage of correct inflections of 23 number and gender of adjectives. Spanish-speaking children produced 71.5% correct adjective agreements as compared to TD children matched on age or MLU who produced
88.2% and 93.5%, respectively. Bedore and Leonard reported that the errors in the inflection of adjectives were a one-feature error, either a gender agreement error or number agreement error, but not both gender and agreement errors.
2.2.7. Subject-verb number agreement
Limited evidence from French SLI studies suggests difficulties with subject-verb number agreement. Franck, Cronel-Ohayon, Chillier, Frauenfelder, Hamman, Rizzi and Zesiger
(2004) studied accuracy of subject-verb number agreement of FS children with SLI using an elicitation task. They reported that children with SLI showed a rate of agreement errors of
26.5% with simple subjects and 36.3% with complex subjects. Franck et al, reported that when the task was administered to 5-year-old TD children, error rates were 15% for simple subjects and 23.3% for complex subjects. There was a tendency to produce fewer errors with singular head nouns than plurals. However, Paradis and Crago (2001) reported that FS children with SLI showed accurate subject verb agreement and did not differ from TD FS children. There was no evidence for IS or SS children with SLI available for this construction.
2.2.8. Prepositions
Cipriani et al. (1998) followed the language development of an IS child with SLI for 6 years.
They used language sample analyses to investigate the use of prepositions in obligatory contexts. Researchers reported that prepositions were extremely affected in the language of 24 this child, characterized by a high rate of omission (>80%) up to age 8. However, this is the only study reporting difficulties with prepositions among the three languages, and it had only one subject. Therefore, these results should be interpreted with caution.
2.3. Summary of grammatical manifestation of SLI in Italian, French and Spanish.
Tables 3, 4, and 5 summarize the findings for each language group. Italian speaking children with SLI evidenced difficulties with third person plural verb inflections, auxiliary avere and essere, definite and indefinite articles, direct and indirect object clitics, and reflexive clitics. In addition to these findings, Bortolini, Caselli, Deevy and Leonard (2002) demonstrated the utility of a composite of articles, clitics and third person plural inflections to differentiate
Italian-speaking children with SLI from TD children. They reported sensitivity (ability to detect the language disorder when it was truly present) for this composite index of 93.3% and specificity (ability to exclude the language disorder when it was truly not present) of 93.3 %.
French-speaking children with SLI showed difficulties with direct object clitic pronouns and future and past tense verbs. Spanish-speaking children with SLI presented with difficulties in definite and indefinite articles, direct object clitic pronouns, plural inflections, and adjective agreement.
Although the research findings are not completely parallel across languages, some similarities are evident. Difficulties with clitic pronouns are a common characteristic of children with SLI in the Romance languages surveyed in this review, although further research is needed to extend the findings regarding this structure. Article difficulties were also evidenced in Italian and Spanish, but were not found in French. Further investigation is 25 needed to establish the source of this difference. Other difficulties with grammatical structures that were not parallel across languages, including auxiliaries, number agreement, and adjective agreement, need further research as well, as they are potential areas for elaboration. 26 Table 3. Grammatical Errors in IS Children with SLI ITALIAN Investigators Sample Size Age Elicitation method Problem Structures Leonard, 8 SLI English 3;6 to 6;9 Spontaneous Third person plural Sabbadini, 8 SLI Italian 4;1 to 6;11 language sample verb inflections Leonard, and –Interaction with Volterra (1987) clinician Leonard, 8 SLI English 3;6 to 6;9 Spontaneous Definite and indefinite Sabbadini, 8 SLI Italian 4;1 to 6;11 language sample articles and clitic Volterra, and –Interaction with object pronouns Leonard (1988) clinician Leonard,Bortolini, 15 SLI 4;0 to 6;0 Picture description Definite articles Caselli, and 15 TD-MLU 2;6 to 3;6 task Sabbadini (1993) Bortolini, Caselli 12 SLI 4;1 to 7;0 Elicitation task Singular definite and Leonard 12 TD-MLU 2;6 to 4;0 articles and third (1997) 12 TD-AGE 3;11 to 7;0 person plural verb inflections Leonard and 25 SLI 4;0 to 7;0 Spontaneous Auxiliaries avere and Bortolini (1998) 25 TD-MLU 2;6 to 4;0 language sample essere forms, direct 25 TD-AGE 3;11 to 7;0 from picture and indirect object, description tasks reflexive and third person plural inflect 12 SLI Spontaneous Difficulties with 12 TD-MLU language sample definite articles Botarri, Cipriani, 11 SLI 4;3 to 10;7 Spontaneous Articles Chilosi and language sample- Pfanner (1998) free play Cipriani, Botarri, 1 SLI Followed Spontaneous Clitic pronouns, Chilosi and from 6;2 language in free definite and indefinite Pfanner (1998) to 13;5 play, conversation articles, and and book reading prepositions Botarri, Cipriani, 11 SLI 4;2 to 10;7 Spontaneous Articles Chilosi, and 2 TD 1;7 language samples Pfanner (2001) Aphasia 1 3;4 Bortolini, Caselli, 12 SLI 4;1 to 7;0 Elicitation task Definite articles, Deevy and 12 TD-AGE 3;11 to 7;0 clitics and third person Leonard (2002) plural inflection Note: SLI: Children with specific language impairment; TD: Typically developing children; TD-MLU: Typically developing children matched on MLU; TD-AGE: Typically developing children matched on age 27 Table 4. Grammatical Errors in FS Children with SLI FRENCH Investigators Sample Size Age Elicitation method Problem Structures Le Normand, 8 SLI 4;0 to 6;0 Spontaneous No difficulties with Leonard, and 8 TD 3;0 to3;6 language using articles McGregor (1993) toys, objects, and pictures Jakubowicz, Nash, 13 SLI 5;7 to 13;0 Elicitation task Direct objects, subject Rigaut, and Gérard 20 TD 5;6 to 5;11 and reflexive pronouns (1998) No difficulties with definite articles Jakubowicz and 28 SLI 5;7 to 13;0 Sentence Past tense productions Nash (2001) 12 TD -3 3 yr old completion task 12 TD -4 4 yr old 12 TD -6 6 yr old
Paradis and Crago 7 SLI 7 yr old Spontaneous Past and future tense (2001) 10 TD-Age 7 yr old language during No difficulties with 10ND-MLU 3 yr old play session subject-verb number agreement
Hamann, Ohayon, 11 SLI 3;10 to 7;11 Spontaneous Object clitic pronouns Dubé, language (not Frauenfelder, specific method Rizzi, Starke and detailed) Zesiger (2003) Franck, Cronel- 8 SLI 5;4 to 9;4 Sentence Subject-verb number Ohayon, Chillier, 60 TD 4;11 to 9;5 completion task agreement Frauenfelder, Hamman, Rizzi and Zesiger (2004)
Grüter (2005) 6 SLI 6;6 to 9;2 Elicitation task Object clitic pronouns 12 TD 6;2 to 7;1
Note: SLI: Children with specific language impairment; TD: Typically developing children; TD-MLU: Typically developing children matched on MLU; TD-AGE: Typically developing children matched on age 28 Table 5. Grammatical Errors in SS Children with SLI SPANISH Investigator Number of Age Elicitation Main Findings subjects method Restrepo and 15 SLI 5;9 (SD 0;8) Language Articles Gutierrez-Clellen 15 TD-AGE 6;1 (SD 0;7) samples (2001) (picture description, interview and story retelling) Anderson and 11 SLI 4;3 to 5;4 Language Articles Souto (2005) 11 TD-AGE 4;3 to 5;4 samples (Picture description, story retelling, play interaction) and elicitation task De la Mora, 10 SLI 5;3 Elicitation task Direct object clitics Paradis, 10 TD- 3;9 Grinstead, Flores MLU 5;0 and Sanchez 10 TD-AGE (2004) Jacobson and 10 SLI 4;2 to 5;4 Elicitation task Direct object clitic Schwartz (2002) 10 TD 4;1 to 5;0 pronouns Bedore and 15 SLI 3;11 to 5;6 Elicitation task Definite and indefinite Leonard (2001) 15 TD-MLU 2;4 to 3;1 articles, direct object 15 TD-AGE 4;0 to 5;6 clitics, noun plurals, and adjective agreement Bedore and 15 SLI 3;11 to 5;6 Language Definite articles, direct Leonard (2005) 15 TD-MLU 2;4 to 3;1 samples during object clitics, and plural 15 TD-AGE 4;0 to 5;6 play nouns
Note: SLI: Children with specific language impairment; TD: Typically developing children; TD-MLU: Typically developing children matched on MLU; TD-AGE: Typically developing children matched on age
2.4. Further research in Spanish-speaking children with SLI
One of the purposes of this chapter was to examine the research in Italian and French in order to look for potential areas of interest for further research on Spanish SLI. Spanish research on
SLI can benefit from Italian and French investigations in two ways. First, structures that have been found to be problematic for FS and IS children could have implications for Spanish, 29 given that there may be similarities across languages in specific structures. Second, some approaches used in Italian and French research can be followed when studying similar grammatical structures in Spanish.
Grammatical structures that have been found to be problematic for IS and FS children can be investigated in more depth in Spanish. For example, the study of clitic pronouns is a potential area for additional research in Spanish. There is evidence that SS children have difficulties with direct object clitic pronouns, however, the clitic system is far more complex than direct objects only. Italian and French researchers have extended their investigations of clitic pronouns to include indirect objects, reflexive, and subject clitics. Some studies on
Italian have also investigated the contexts where clitic pronouns are more prone to be omitted.
Therefore, research on clitic pronouns in Spanish should be oriented towards investigating direct and indirect objects, as well as reflexive pronouns. As discussed above, it is also possible that spontaneous or elicited tasks differ in the rates of clitic omission; therefore, both types of task should be used to examine clitic pronouns.
Research in Italian and French has investigated monolingual speaking children with
SLI. In Spanish, some of the studies have been conducted with Spanish-speaking children learning a second language. Although it is important to study second language learners, it is also important to collect data on monolingual Spanish-speaking children with SLI. The true characteristics of Spanish-speaking children with SLI would be revealed only when studying monolingual children because some bilingual children may show influences from the second language being learned or may be losing their first language. 30 Another approach that the Italian research has followed is to search for a composite of grammatical clinical markers. Group means may not truly characterize individuals with
SLI. Therefore, research on the utility of grammatical markers to differentiate TD children from children with SLI is very important in the clinical domain. Further research in Spanish should be oriented toward finding a composite index of grammatical structures that can be used as a diagnostic tool to reliably identify children with SLI.
In summary, research on Italian and French suggests that further research on Spanish- speaking children with SLI should focus on extending the research on clitic pronouns as well as other errors. This research should be conducted on monolingual children and should include both spontaneous and elicited language analyses, as the previous studies have done. In addition, grammatical markers should be investigated to find a diagnostic clinical tool for the identification of Spanish-speaking children with SLI. Structures that have been found to be problematic for SS children with SLI, such as articles, adjectives, plurals, and clitic pronouns, should also be investigated during normal development to establish acquisition milestones.
These observations have guided the examination of the acquisition of the specific morphosyntactic structures selected for investigation in SS children, which is described in
Chapter 4. 31 3. LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT IN MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL
CHILDREN
This chapter presents the reader with information on assessment that is relevant to Spanish monolingual children and Spanish-English bilingual children. Although there is a vast amount of information on language assessment, the focus of this chapter is on the collection of data specifically related to morphosyntax.
In the field of speech-language pathology, language assessment is a procedure that involves the collection and analysis of data to describe the language skills of a child and to identify whether the child is following typical development patterns or whether he/she presents with a language disorder. The definition of language disorders proposed by Paul
(2001) states that children with language disorders present with a “significant deficit in learning to talk, understand, or use any aspect of language appropriately, relative to both environmental and norm-referenced expectations for children of similar developmental level
(p. 3)”. Following this definition, SLPs need to identify whether a “language deficit” exists using environmental and normative standards. Environmental standards refer to the identification of language deficits by those familiar with the child, including parents and caregivers as a primary source of information (Paul, 2001). Normative standards refer to the identification of language deficits by comparing the language skills of a child to the language skills of other children with a similar developmental pattern.
During language assessment, SLPs use a variety of methods to collect language data.
The assessment techniques that the SLP chooses will depend mostly on the type of information that is of interest to each specific case. Paul (2001) described four basic types of 32 techniques for the assessment of language skills in children. These techniques differ in the types of data they provide. Norm-referenced tests are administered to obtain information about how a child performs in a specific language task compared to other children of the same age. Criterion referenced tests are also used to determine the child’s level of performance on a specific language task but compared to a specific set standard. Developmental scales are used to collect information on a specific skill in a particular developmental period. These scales often provide an estimation of age-equivalent performance on a particular task. Observations are used to describe the performance of a child on a specific aspect of language, providing a detailed description of a language behavior. Criterion-referenced tests, developmental scales, and observations are mainly used to describe the language skills of a child. In contrast, norm- referenced tests are used to make specific comparisons of language skills across children. It is highly recommended to use a combination of these methods when assessing language. Each method provides a different perspective on the language skills of the child and this information is necessary to make an adequate diagnosis of language status and to develop a treatment plan.
Norm-referenced language tests provide SLPs with normative standards to make comparisons of language skills. The SLP uses this normative information to identify whether a child is performing within, below, or above the language expectations for his/her chronological age. However, the question remains as to how far below the norm a child has to perform to be considered to have a language disorder. Tomblin, Records, and Zhang (1996) suggested the use of a cutoff score of 1.25 standard deviations below the mean on at least two of five norm-referenced composite scores as an identification criterion for a language disorder. 33 This criterion has also been used in the identification of Spanish-speaking children with SLI
(Bedore & Leonard, 2001, 2005).
With respect to environmental standards, parents appear to be a reliable source of valuable information in the identification of children with language disorders, at least during early development. Parental reports such as the MacArthur-Bates Communicative
Developmental Inventories (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Thal, Bates, Hartung, Pethick & Reilly,
1993) and the Language Developmental Survey (Rescorla, 1993) are valid measures of vocabulary used to identify toddlers with language disorders. Similarly, The Language Use
Inventory for Young Children(O’Neill, 2007), a parental report of pragmatic language, has also been shown to be a valid measure for identifying children with language disorders.
Parental reports also seem to be reliable and valid tools for identifying preschool age
Spanish-speaking children with language disorders. Restrepo (1998) developed a parent questionnaire examining potential speech and language problems for Spanish-speaking children. This parental report discriminated SS children with SLI from typically developing children with a sensitivity of 73.91% and a specificity of 95.65%. Therefore, the use of parental reports seems to be a valuable practice when assessing language in all populations, including Spanish-speaking children.
The language assessment principles described above apply to both monolingual and bilingual children. However, the assessment of bilingual children poses additional challenges.
The question of whether language development in bilingual children resembles the language development of monolingual children has been a topic of considerable recent interest, as it is specifically related to language assessment. Some evidence suggests that the development of 34 each of the languages of the bilingual children follows a very similar pattern to the language development of monolingual children (Genesee, Paradis & Crago, 2004). These findings have been supported for Spanish-English bilingual children as well (Bedore, 2004). However, further research is needed to confirm these findings. This topic has a very important implication for the language assessment of bilingual children, indicating that the information collected in each of the languages might be compared to monolingual standards. Nevertheless, disagreement still exists on this issue (Kester & Peña, 2002).
Although there is not much discussion needed about the definition of monolingualism, the term bilingualism can be interpreted in various ways. There are a variety of types of bilingualism reported in the literature, but the two main categories that would be expected to have a significant impact on assessment are simultaneous versus sequential bilingualism.
Simultaneous bilingualism occurs when a child is exposed to two languages from birth and, therefore, acquires the two languages simultaneously (Genesee et al. 2004). Sequential bilingualism occurs when the child is exposed to only one language from birth and exposure to a second language occurs later on during development (Hoff, 2005). Genesee et al. (2004) have suggested using the generic term “dual language learners” to describe both groups of bilinguals.
CASLPA’s position statement regarding SLPs working in multicultural contexts
(Crago & Westernoff, 1997) and specifically the assessment of bilingual children states:
Appropriate assessment implies that: (a) the identification of disorders is optimally made in the first language (L1), combined with assessment in the second language (L2); (b) the assessment is culturally and linguistically appropriate; (c) the assessment is ongoing; (d) the assessment process is naturalistic, holistic, and includes the use of non standardised approaches; (e) the assessment considers societal 35 factors that may be impeding language proficiency (e.g., first language loss, biased educational practices, premorbid language mastery); and, (f) the reports of the assessment are descriptive (p.3).
CASLPA recommendations, which stem from a more theoretical view of bilingualism, are suggested as the gold standard in the assessment of bilingual children. Nevertheless, research evidence is needed to fully support them. These recommendations pose some very interesting questions, such as what could be considered a culturally and linguistically appropriate assessment. There has been a lot of debate regarding standardized assessment for
Spanish-English bilingual children (e.g., Simon-Cerejido & Gutierrez-Clellen, 2007). In general, it has been concluded that no culturally and linguistically appropriate standardized assessment for Spanish-English bilingual children is currently available. Therefore, the main recommendation regarding assessment in culturally and linguistically diverse populations is to use developmental measures obtained through the analysis of spontaneous language (ASHA,
1985, Gutierrez-Clellen et al., 2000; Restrepo & Gutierrez-Clellen, 2004).
Developmental language measures are obtained from spontaneous language samples and provide information about the stage of language development of a child. Measures such as mean length of utterance, subordination index and grammatical errors per T-units are suggested measures to evaluate narrative development (Paul, 2001). The collection of spontaneous production data has been recognized as an extremely useful method to investigate morphological development across languages (Demuth, 1996). Different methods such as interviews, picture description, story retelling, and free play, among others, have been used to elicit language samples (Gazella & Stockman, 2003; Gutierrez-Clellen & Hofstetter, 1994;
Southwood & Russell, 2004; Wagner, Nettelbladt, Sahlen, & Nilholm, 2002). Story retelling 36 has been found to elicit more complex stories than the other techniques in English-speaking children (Gazella & Stockman, 2003; Wagner et al., 2002).
Research on elicitation techniques in Spanish speaking children is very limited, however, a pilot study conducted by Restrepo, Youngs, and Castilla (2005) found that a story retelling task led to more grammatical errors than either picture description or interview tasks.
In addition, Restrepo and Castilla (2007) suggested that story retelling is a culturally appropriate task for Spanish-speaking children. Furthermore, Sebastian and Slobin (1994) suggested that preschool Spanish-speaking children’s narratives contained appropriate use of aspectual distinctions, simple chaining connectors, word order variation, clitic object pronouns, and verbs of motion with person and number marking.
In summary, SLPs are required to collect data that represent the language status of a child and that are then compared to normative and environmental standards in order to adequately identify children with language disorders. Bilingual children should be assessed in both their first and second languages with culturally and linguistically appropriate assessment tools that identify the salient characteristics of the language being evaluated. There is a paucity of normative information for SS monolingual and bilingual children. The analysis of language samples has been suggested as an alternative when assessing culturally and linguistic diverse populations. The use of parental report seems to be a good indicator of potential language disorders in children. Further research is needed to provide normative standards for
SS children. 37
4. SPANISH LANGUAGE ACQUISTION
This chapter provides the reader with information on the acquisition of Spanish. Section one will cover a grammatical overview of Spanish with an emphasis on the grammatical structures of interest in this study. Section two will present research on the acquisition of articles, clitic pronouns, plurals, and adjectives. The last section will present information on developmental language measures in Spanish-speaking children.
4.1 Spanish grammatical structures overview
Spanish is the official language of Spain and most Latin American countries. Spanish also has an influential role in English speaking countries such as the United States, where
Hispanics are currently the second largest minority group (the terms Latin American, Latino and Hispanic are used interchangeably through this paper). The Spanish language is known for its rich morphology. Nouns, adjectives, articles, subject and object pronouns are inflected for gender and number. Verbs are inflected for person, tense, mood, and voice. Person inflection includes first person (the speaker), second person (the one spoken to), and third person (the one spoken about). Tense inflections are divided into two groups: simple tenses, which include present, future, imperfect and past tense, and compound tenses consisting of present perfect, future perfect and past perfect. There are four mood conjugations in Spanish: indicative (used for factual statements and positive beliefs), subjunctive (used to express emotion, commands, wishes, and judgments), conditional (used when the realization of an event depends on a certain condition), and imperative (used to express direct commands, 38 requests, and prohibitions). Voice inflection consists of active and passive voices. Because the verb system is highly inflected, Spanish is a pro-drop language, which means that subject pronouns are optional because the information about the subject is always marked in the verb.
Spanish canonical order is subject-verb-object, but word order can vary to reflect patterns of information structure (old/new, topic/focus).
4.1.1 Noun phrase agreement. In Spanish, all elements of the noun phrase (determiners, nouns, and adjectives) must agree in both number and gender. In Spanish, nouns have grammatical gender (feminine/masculine). In general, feminine grammatical gender is assigned to nouns ending in /a/ and to semantically feminine nouns (e.g., mesa/table; niña/girl). Masculine grammatical gender is assigned to nouns ending in /o/ and to semantically masculine nouns (e.g., cielo/sky; profesor/male teacher). There are various exceptions to this rule, for example, the word día/day ends in /a/, but has a masculine gender.
Similarly, the word mano/hand ends in /o/ but has a feminine gender.
Articles are divided into definite and indefinite articles. Definite articles are used when referring to a particular member of a group, and indefinite articles are used when referring to any member of a group. Definite and indefinite articles must agree with the noun in number and gender. See Table 6 for a list of articles in Spanish. In narratives, as is the case in English, indefinite articles are used when introducing characters to the story and, once they are introduced, definite articles are used to make reference to the specific characters. 39 Table 6. Spanish Definite and Indefinite Articles Articles Feminine Feminine Masculine Masculine Singular Plural Singular Plural Definite la las lo los Indefinite una unas un unos
Adjective use in Spanish is very similar to adjective use in English, with two exceptions. First, unlike English, adjectives in Spanish are usually placed after the noun (eg.
La casa roja/ the house-red; el color verde/the color-green). Second, adjectives must agree with the noun they are modifying in number and person. For example, if modifying the word niña/girl (feminine/singular) the adjective must follow the same pattern and inflect with the feminine singular ending: bonita/beautiful. If modifying the word niños/boys
(masculine/plural), the adjective must agree with the noun and inflect with the ending for masculine plural: bonitos/beautiful.
There are two grammatical numbers in Spanish: singular and plural. Plural number is marked by adding /s/ to nouns and adjectives when they end in vowels and /es/ when they end in consonants (e.g., silla/chair, sillas/chairs; árbol/tree, árboles/trees). Some words are grammatically plural (e.g., pantalones/pants, tijeras/scissors) but in some dialects they are taken to be semantically singular, hence singular forms are used interchangeably (pantalón, tijera).
4.1.2 Clitic pronouns. In Spanish, object pronouns are clitics, which means that they are free morphemes that must occur adjacent to the verb. They can be positioned before (preclitic) or after (enclitic) the verb. The Spanish object pronoun system is very rich because object pronouns must agree with the nouns they replace in number and gender. See Table 7 for a list 40 of clitic object pronouns in Spanish. In addition, object pronouns are related to verbs as direct or indirect objects; clitics pronouns le and les are indirect objects, also known as datives.
The “se” pronoun, usually known as reflexive, is a clitic pronoun with a more complex system of use. There are at least four types of “se” pronouns: reflexive, pseudo-reflexive, spurious, and impersonal. In Spanish, the use of the reflexive clitic pronouns “se” as direct object is obligatory when the subject (the doer of the action) is also receiving the action
(object) (e.g., Me bañe/I bathed myself; Se baño/ He bathed himself). The “se” pronoun can also act as a pseudo-reflexive pronoun when used with verbs that require the “se” pronoun
(pronominal verbs), but there is no reflexivity. For example, the verb “arrepentirse/to regret” obligatorily requires the “se” pronoun, although the action of regret is not reflexive. The spurious “se” pronoun is used instead of the dative “le” to avoid the awkward combination (le- lo) in the same sentence. For example, the “se” pronoun in the sentence “se lo da” is not a true reflexive and, in fact, it is replacing the use of “le lo da”. The impersonal “se” is used when there is not a specific doer of the action, and it is equivalent to the English “one”. For example, in the sentence “se habla ingles/English is spoken” there is no reference to who speaks English.
Table 7. Spanish Clitic Pronouns Person Singular Plural 1st me Nos 2nd te Os 3rd Masculine lo los 3rd Feminine la las 3rd Dative le Les 3rd Reflexive se Se 41 4.2 Research on Spanish Morphosyntactic Acquisition
Most of the studies that have investigated Spanish morphosyntactic development have focused on the acquisition of verb morphology (e.g., Kernan & Blount, 1966; Kvaal,
Shipstead-Cox, Nevitt, Hodson, & Laurner, 1988). This might have occurred because of the challenges that the complex morphological verb system may present for child language acquisition. However, as discussed previously, research suggests that Spanish-speaking children with SLI have few problems with the verb system as compared to the difficulties they show with articles, plurals, adjectives, and object clitic pronouns (Bedore & Leonard, 2001,
2005). Nevertheless, research on the normal acquisition of these specific grammatical structures remains limited.
Some researchers have reported that SS TD children continue to make grammatical errors in their speech up to the age of five (Brisk, 1982; Cohen, 1976). Brisk (1982) investigated the syntactic development of 7 five-year old Spanish-speaking children born in
New Mexico using structured interviews to elicit language samples. She reported that, although nouns, adjectives, and articles were frequently used in the speech of all children, agreement errors between articles and nouns were still present at age five. However, these children were born in New Mexico; it is not clear whether the children spoke Spanish only or were Spanish-English bilinguals. Similarly, Cohen (1976) studied 90 five-year old SS children children. He examined the grammatical errors that children produced in Spanish stories and reported that 5-year old children made grammatical errors on articles and pronouns, among other error types. However, errors in both of the previous studies might be explained by language loss potential manifestations. Language loss occurs when a first language is partially 42 lost because a second language is being used more frequently. In this case, these children may have experienced Spanish language loss because English was being introduced at school.
One of the common patterns seen in Spanish speaking children who are learning a second language and experiencing language loss is agreement errors on articles and object pronouns
(Anderson, 2004).
4.2.1 Articles
Only limited information is available on the acquisition of articles in SS children. Researchers have suggested that SS children start producing articles as early as 20 months (Hernandez-
Piña, 1984; Lopez-Ornat, 1997; Montes, 1974). For example, Montes (1974) investigated
Spanish language development in four Colombian children in a longitudinal study using spontaneous language samples. He reported that definite articles began to appear between 20 and 26 months of age, and indefinite articles between 25 and 34 months. Maez (1984) reported that 24 month old children produced definite and indefinite singular articles with some occasional errors on gender agreement, but did not produce plural articles. Lopez-Ornat
(1997) studied the language corpus of a monolingual Spanish-speaking child and found that she produced articles and nouns marked for gender agreement at about the age of 26 months.
In general, researchers have concluded that gender agreement between nouns and articles is established by age 3 or 4 (Hernandez-Piña, 1984; Montrul, 2004: Perez-Pereira, 1991).
However, no information is available on the acquisition of plural articles. Moreover, with the exception of Montes (1974), no information on the differences between the acquisition of definite and indefinite articles is available in current research studies. 43 4.2.2 Object Clitic Pronouns
Few studies describe the acquisition of Spanish object clitic pronouns. Gonzalez (1978) reported that children begin to use direct object pronouns as early as two years of age. Shum,
Conde and Diaz (1992) studied the pronoun acquisition of three children from 2 to 3;6 years.
They reported that children at 3;6 years of age used third person object clitic pronouns with some errors of omission, addition and agreement. Anderson (1998) studied personal pronoun use by 40 monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish children between the ages of 2 and 4. She found that 27 of the 40 children she studied had mastered the personal pronoun system; however, the age range in acquiring these pronouns was not reported. The error most frequently found in this study was omission of clitic pronouns. Finally, Merino (1992) reported that gender agreement of direct object pronouns was acquired between 5 and 7 years, but did not provide research evidence to support this claim. No information on number agreement development and differences between direct and indirect object pronouns was available from these research studies.
4.2.3 Noun-Adjective agreement.
Gonzalez (1978) is the only researcher to date to examine agreement between articles, nouns, and adjectives in Spanish. He investigated morphosyntactic acquisition in 23 Spanish- speaking children in Texas from age 2 to 5 using a cross-sectional design study. Although children had contact with a second language (English), Gonzalez reported that these children came from a community with very good language maintenance. He reported that gender and number inflection on articles, nouns, and adjectives was established by age 3;6. 44 4.2.4 Plural inflection.
With respect to the acquisition of plurals, researchers have reported differences between the development of plurals with the allomorphs /s/ and /es/. For example, Kernan and Blount
(1966) used an elicitation task based on nonsense words to investigate Spanish grammatical acquisition by Mexican children. They studied 92 children from 5 to 12 years of age and reported that the children did not have difficulties with the formation of plurals requiring the addition of the allomorph /s/; however, children up to 12 years old presented difficulties with the plural task requiring the addition of /es/. These data suggest that children acquire plural for nouns ending in vowels earlier than for nouns ending in consonants.
Similarly, Perez-Pereira (1988) studied 109 Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 3 and 6 years who were born in Spain. He used a nonsense word task adapted from
Kernan and Blount (1966), as well as a real word task. Perez-Pereira found that, in general, all children were more accurate with the allomorphs /s/ than with /es/ in both real and artificial words. More specifically, the plural morpheme with the allomorph /es/ was found to be more accurately used at age 4 than at age 3. Maez (1984) also found support for this pattern of acquisition. He studied the spontaneous speech of three children from 18 to 24 months who spoke Spanish as a first language but had some limited contact with English (e.g., watched TV in English). He reported that the children produced nouns with the allomorph /s/ at 24 months of age, but did not produce any plural nouns with allomorph /es/. In general, the data suggest that plural marking emerges first with the allomorph /s/, shortly followed by the allomorph
/es/. Merino (1992) suggested that children seem to have mastered both plural forms by age 4, but no empirical evidence was provided to support this claim. 45
4.2.5 Summary of acquisition of Spanish grammatical structures
Table 8 presents a summary of the information on the acquisition of grammatical structures based on the reviewed studies.
Table 8. Acquisition of Grammatical Structures Structure 3 years old 4 years old 5 years old
Plurals no errors on Acquired Acquired allomorph /s/ Articles errors on definite and Acquired Acquired indefinite articles Adjectives errors on gender and Acquired Acquired number agreement Clitic pronouns errors on object clitic errors on object clitic errors on object clitic pronouns pronouns pronouns
4.3 Research on developmental measures
Developmental measures such as number of Terminable Units (T-unit), where a T-unit is a main clause plus its subordinated clauses (Hunt, 1965), mean length of T-units (MLTU), number of grammatical errors per T-unit, and subordination index, that is the number of complex sentences divided by total number of T-Units, have been shown to be sensitive to changes in language development (Paul, 2001). Research on SS children is very limited in this area, but researchers Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter (1994) studied 77 SS children and found developmental differences among 5-, 6-, and 8-year old children in MLTU and subordination index. They reported mean MLTU values of 6.5 (SD=.9) for the 5-year old group, 6.9 (SD=1.1) for the 6-year old group, and 7.3 (SD=1.2) for the 8-year old group. 46 Additionally, they reported mean values for subordination index for the three groups: 1.11
(SD=.13) for the 5-year old group, 1.18 (SD=.11) for 6-year old group and 1.23 (SD=.13) for
8-year old group. In contrast, Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter (1994) found no significant differences in number of T-units among the three groups. They reported a mean value for number of T-units of 24.3 (SD=19.5) for the 5-year old group.
With respect to typical versus atypical development, Restrepo (1998) studied two groups of five-year old children with typical development (n=31) and with SLI (n=31) and found that MLTU and number of grammatical errors per T-unit discriminated children with typical language from children with language impairments. She reported a MLTU value of 5.6 and a number of grammatical errors per T-unit value of 0.09 for the typically developing children. However, the results from these studies should be interpreted with some caution because the children had exposure to and were learning a second language and this could have had an impact on their first language skills. No information is available on MLTU, subordination index, or grammatical errors per T-unit in monolingual Spanish-speaking children from that study.
Further information is needed to characterize number of T-units, MLTU, grammatical errors per T-unit, and subordination index in normally developing SS children. Preliminary research provides estimated mean values for age groups (see Table 9), but further research is needed to confirm these estimates. Story retelling seems to be a reliable task to collect complex narratives permitting the examination number of T-units, MLTU, grammatical errors per T-unit, and subordination index in SS children. 47 Table 9. Means and Standard Deviations (in parentheses) for Developmental Language Measures Gutierrez-Clellen & Restrepo (1998) Simon-Cereijido & Hofstetter (1994) (Age (Age 6;2) Gutierrez-Clellen (2007) 5;0) (Age 4;6) NU-TU 24.30 (19.50) Not reported Not reported
MLTU 6.50 (.90) 5.60 (.80) 5.70 (1.00)
SUB-I 1.11 (.13) Not reported Not reported
GRE-TU Not reported 0.09 (.05) 0.17 (.04) 48 5. PURPOSE AND QUESTIONS
Information on language acquisition and developmental language measures in monolingual Spanish-speaking children continues to be limited. Although some limited data on developmental measures have been provided for Spanish-speaking children who are acquiring English as a second language, research on monolingual children is urgently needed.
Similarly, there is an enormous information gap with respect to monolingual Spanish language acquisition that is evident when compared to information on other languages, specifically
English. This paucity of information on language acquisition and developmental measures presents a challenge for professionals who work in Spanish environments, particularly speech- language pathologists, teachers, and researchers interested in child language.
The purpose of this study was to examine morphosyntactic language development among 3-, 4-, and 5-year old monolingual SS children using both a story retelling and an elicitation task. Four developmental language measures were used for this purpose: number of
T-units, MLTU, grammatical errors per T-unit and subordination index. In addition, this study aimed to examine the production of articles, adjectives, plurals, and clitic object pronouns by SS monolingual children using both of the tasks.
This study aimed to answer two specific questions:
a. What are the typical values for number of T-units, mean length of T-units in words,
subordination index, and number of grammatical errors per T-unit measures among 3-,
4-, and 5-year old monolingual SS children?
b. How can we characterize the production of clitic object pronouns, articles, plurals and
adjectives by SS monolingual children at ages 3, 4 and 5? 49 The hypotheses for the developmental language measures and for the pattern of production of articles, adjectives, plurals, and clitic object pronouns were based on the data available for
SS children as presented in chapter 4, as follows:
a. The mean value for number of T-units for the 5-year old group will be within 0.5 SD
of that reported in Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter (1994) (24.3, SD=19.5).
b. The mean value for mean length of T-units in words for the 5-year old group will be
within 0.5 SD of that reported in Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter (1994) (6.5, SD=.9).
c. The mean value for subordination index for the 5-year old group will be within 0.5 SD
of that reported in Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter (1994) (1.1 , SD=.13).
d. The mean value for grammatical errors per T-unit for the 5-year old group will be
within 0.5 SD of that reported in Restrepo (1998) (0.09, SD=.05).
e. Five-year old children’s performance on the elicitation task for articles, plurals,
adjectives and clitic pronouns will resemble adult performance in the same tasks. 50
6. METHOD
This section presents the specific details regarding the methodology employed in this investigation. Section one (6.1) presents the description of the participants. Section two (6.2) describes the measures used to collect the data. Section three (6.3) describes the procedures that were followed during the data collection. Section four (6.4) presents the results of the reliability analysis.
With respect to the sampling procedure, the present study utilized a normative developmental cross-sectional design. Two different methodological approaches could have been taken when deciding on the sampling technique for this type of study: truncated normative samples and normal normative samples (Ukrainetz, 1996). In truncated normative samples, children with language problems and other special needs are intentionally excluded form the sample. In normal normative samples, all children, regardless of language status, are included in the sample to be able to represent the full range of abilities that are expected to exist in the population that the sample represents (Ukrainetz, 1996). This study follows a normal normative sampling methodological technique to be able to describe the language performance of all children, including children with potential language disorders whose performance on the language test could be represented in the low extreme of the normal distribution. 51 6.1 Participants
This section provides information about the participants in the study. There were two sets of participants, a large group of child participants and a small group of adult participants whose data served as a point of comparison for the acquisition of the structures of interest by the children. The child participants were 115 monolingual SS children (55 boys and 60 girls) enrolled in schools in Cali, Colombia. Children were included in the study if their chronological age was three, four, or five years (+ or – 3 months). Children were grouped into three age categories: three year olds (n=39, mean age= 35.7 months, SD= 1.7, 16 boys and 23 girls), four year olds (n=40, mean age=47.8, SD= 1.9, 17 boys and 23 girls) and five year olds
(n=36, mean age=59.2, SD= 1.8, 22 boys and 14 girls). Figure 1 illustrates the means and standard deviations for the chronological age in months of the three groups of children.
Age Groups
Figure 1. Chronological Age Box Plot 52 Children were recruited from nine schools in the city of Cali. The number of children per school varied according to the number of children in the age groups required.
This variability is shown in Figure 2. The data for the study were collected from private schools, which is the type of school most prevalent in Colombia. This means that most parents pay for the education of their children. School fees differ according to the socio economic status of the area where the school is located. Therefore, school affiliation was used to establish socio-economic status in all but one school (MF). Although MF is a private school, it receives funding from the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar; (ICBF,
Colombian Institute for Family Well-Being), which provides services to low-income families.
For this specific school, student’s records were used to establish SES. Level one is the lowest level and six is the highest. Schools from SEL 1 were not included in this study because it represents extreme poverty. Poverty has an effect on a variety of skill including cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and language development of children. Including these children in the sample could have had a potential confound on the language measures (Thomas-Presswood &
Presswood, 2008). In addition, visiting schools in this SEL was considered an unsafe practice for the investigator. Schools from SEL 6 were not included in the study because they are generally bilingual schools. Figure 3 illustrates the socio economic status (SES) of the children in this study. 53
Figure 2. Number of Children per School- Independent of SES
Figure 3. Percentage of Children per SES 54 All children included in the study passed an audiometric hearing screening test using a portable audiometer Inter Acoustic AD25. Children had their hearing screened at 30 dB for each ear at test frequencies of 1000, 2000, and 4000 HZ. The pass/fail criterion was the failure to respond to any test presentation in either ear at 30dB (Northern & Downs, 2002). Two children failed the screening test and were therefore not included in the study. Their parents were contacted to inform them about the results of the screening. One of the parents reported that they knew their child had a middle ear infection. The other child was a 2;9 month old child who did not seem to follow the directions of the test appropriately. Parents of this child were told to repeat the hearing screening in three months.
A group of 10 adult participants was recruited to provide information on adult performance on the elicitation task. The adult group consisted of six monolingual-Spanish speaking females and four males from Colombia. Participants were selected to match the SES of the children investigated and included four participants from SES level 3, three participants from SES level 4, and three participants from SES level 5. SES level was determined by the neighborhood were they lived. Ages of the adult participants ranged between 26 and 50 years.
The adult data were collected in order to obtain a baseline against which child performance could be compared to measure acquisition of the structures of interest in the research.
6.2 Measures
Four measures were used to obtain information on language development in Spanish: a parent questionnaire, the Test de Vocabulario en Imágenes (Dunn, Lugo, Padilla & Dunn,
1997), a language sample, and an elicitation task. Each of these is described below. 55
6.2.1 Parent Questionnaire. This questionnaire was developed by Restrepo (1998).
Permission to use this measure was obtained from the author. The parent questionnaire consists of two parts: a Parental Report of the Child’s Educational, Speech, or Language
Problems (PRSLP) and a Family History of Educational, Speech, and Language Problems
(FHSLP). The PRSLP includes 28 questions about parental perceptions of whether their child has problems with expressive or receptive language, learning, and attention, as compared with other children of the same age group. The FHSLP includes 21 questions about any history of speech and language disorders, learning or reading disabilities, and attention deficit or hyperactivity problems in the family, including siblings, father, mother, and grandparents, with 105 questions in total. All questions in the questionnaire were in yes/no format and were balanced so not all “desirable” answers were yes (See Appendix 1-Spanish- and 2-English for a copy of the questionnaires).
The PRSLP was scored assigning one point for each concern that parents reported. For example, one point was assigned if parents responded “yes” to the following question: “Do your family or friends think that your child is difficult to understand?” The total score for the questionnaire was the sum of all points representing concerns. A high score represented a high level of parental concern about their child’s speech and language development. Restrepo
(1998) reported a mean score of 17 for a language disordered group. The FHSLP was scored assigning one point for each question identified as a concern. The total score represented the number of speech and language or problems reported in the family. Restrepo (1998) reported a 56 mean score of 23 for a language disordered group. Separate scores were calculated for the
FHSLP and the PRSLP.
6.2.2 Test de Vocabulario en Imágenes Peabody (TVIP; Dunn et al., 1997). This test is based on the English version of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn & Dunn, 1997).
The TVIP assesses receptive vocabulary in Spanish-speaking children. In administering this test, children are asked to point to pictures that match different stimulus words presented orally by the examiner. Norms for this test were developed by testing monolingual Spanish- speaking students in Mexico and Puerto Rico. The procedures to administer and score the
TVIP were those outlined in the TVIP manual for examiners. The mean standard score for the
TVIP is 100 with a standard deviation of 15.
6.2.3 Language Sample. A language sample was collected from each child using a story retelling task. The story for this task was the wordless picture book “Frog Goes to Dinner”
(Mayer, 1974) with a Spanish script developed specifically for this study. The script had 47 T- units with a MLTU of 9.52 and a subordination index of 1.47. The script was written with the intention of including at least 5 modeled tokens of each of the grammatical structures of interest. It contained 64 definite articles, 13 indefinite articles, 10 direct object pronouns, 14 reflexives, 6 plurals and 15 adjectives. The script is provided in Appendix 3.
The examiner read the story to each child using the script while the child looked at the pictures in the book. Once the story was finished, the examiner asked the child to retell the story while looking at the pictures. If children were shy to start retelling the story, the 57 examiner used the first page of the book to ask the child to identify the characters of the story. Once the child identified the characters, the examiner asked the child again to retell the story. During the story retelling the examiner asked questions such as “y entonces qué pasó?
(and then what happened?), “y que más” (what else?) and praised children for their efforts.
The narrative recounts were recorded using a Sony Mini Disk Hi-MD Walkman Digital
Music Player with a Sony ECM-719 electret condenser microphone. Audio files were transferred to a computer hard drive using Sony Stage Music Software and then were copied to DVDs. A native Spanish speaker transcribed each recording using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts Research Version 8 Software (SALT; Miller & Chapman, 1996).
Each transcription was segmented and coded using an adaptation of the SALT coding protocol for Spanish (see Appendix 4). Counts of correct productions of articles, clitic object pronouns, adjectives, and plurals produced in the sample were calculated from the narratives.
Additionally, the following four developmental language measures were calculated from the language samples:
a. Mean Length of Terminable Units in Words (MLTU; Gutierrez-Clellen et al., 2000). A
Terminable Unit (T-unit) is a main clause plus its subordinated clauses (Hunt, 1965).
The T-unit Spanish adaptation suggested by Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter (1994)
was used to segment the sample into T-units. That is, coordinated sentences that were
subjectless were considered as separate T-units, unlike English where they are counted
as one.
b. Number of T-units is the count of T-units per narrative (NU-TU). 58 c. Subordination Index is the number of dependent and independent clauses divided by
the total number of T-units (SUB-I, Paul, 2001).
d. Number of Grammatical Errors per T-unit (GRE-TU; Restrepo, 1998) is the sum of
grammatical errors for all T-units divided by the total number of T-units.
6.2.4 Elicitation Task. An elicitation task (ET) evaluating clitic object pronouns, articles, adjectives and plurals was designed for this study. The elicitation task was divided into three sections. Section one evaluated indefinite articles and plurals. Section two examined direct object pronouns, indirect object pronouns and reflexive pronouns. Section three evaluated definite articles, adjectives, and plurals. A list of the specific grammatical structures is presented in Table 10. Although the grammatical structures are individually presented in this list, they were analyzed within the context of the sentence.
A total of twenty grammatical structures were evaluated with a minimum of three tokens per structure. The elicitation task consisted of 27 pictures eliciting 41 target responses.
Some pictures elicited more than one structure and some structures needed more than one picture to be elicited. Some target answers evaluated more that one grammatical structure; for example, the target answer las uvas verdes/the green grapes/ included a feminine plural definite article, a plural noun, and a plural adjective. Each section of the elicitation task had three practice items to train the children to the task. The elicitation task is provided in
Appendix 5.
The MacArthur Inventario del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas (Jackson-
Maldonado, Thal, Marchman, Newton, Fenson, & Conboy, 2003), the Spanish version of 59 MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (Fenson et al., 1993) was used as a vocabulary source to select the verbs, nouns, and adjectives used in the elicitation task.
This parent report instrument of receptive vocabulary was designed for use with children from
8 to 30 months and was normed on monolingual Spanish-speaking children. Therefore, it was deemed the best available vocabulary source for 3 year old Spanish-speaking children.
Each of the prompt questions was written using simple sentences in the present tense.
Once the prompts were designed, an illustrator from Cali, Colombia, was contacted to draw the pictures. Special considerations were taken to ensure that the pictures were age appropriate to maintain attention and interest during the task.
To administer the test, the examiner followed the information contained in the task protocol booklet for the elicitation task and asked the questions outlined for each page. To ensure the highest coding accuracy, the examiner audio recorded all the answers provided by the children using the Sony Mini Disk Hi-MD Walkman Digital Music Player with the microphone. The audio files were transferred to a computer hard drive using Sony Stage
Music Software and then were copied to DVDs. A native Spanish speaker transcribed the responses on a response sheet. Each response was coded using the coding protocol for elicitation task, as illustrated in Appendixes 6-10.
Pilot data were collected to verify the feasibility of the elicitation task and to determine the length of the testing session with children. The pilot data were collected from 3 Spanish- speaking adults and 5 Spanish-speaking children who lived in the Greater Toronto Area. The adults were native Spanish-speakers from Colombia who spoke English as a second language. 60
Table 10. Grammatical Structures for the Elicitation Task
ARTICLES Examples Definite article feminine singular La mariposa/ the butterfly Definite article masculine singular El pescado/the fish Definite article feminine plural Las uvas/ the grapes Definite article masculine plural Los pajaros/ the birds Indefinite article feminine singular Una mesa/ a table Indefinite article masculine singular Un perro/ a dog Indefinite article feminine plural Unas flores/ some flowers Indefinite article masculine plural Unos trenes/ some trains PLURALS Examples Allomorph /s/ Carros/ cars Allomorph /es/ Flores/ Flowers ADJECTIVES Examples Singular Amarillo/yellow Plural Verdes/ green plural Feminine Roja/ red feminine Masculine Rojo/ red masculine CLITIC OBJECT PRONOUNS Examples 3rd Feminine singular La peina / combs her 3rd Masculine singular Lo lee/ reads it 3rd Feminine plural Las corta/ cuts them 3rd Masculine plural Los lava/ washes them 3rd Reflexive and Spurious “se” Se lo toma/ drinks it himself Se la da/ it is given to 3rd Dative Le escribe/ writes her/his Note. 3rd = Third person. 61 Spanish-English bilingual children from Spanish-speaking families. Four of the children were 3 years old and one was 5 years old. Children seemed to enjoy the task and on average it took them about 10-15 minutes to complete. Results from these pilot data led to the conclusion that the elicitation task was appropriate for the target age groups. One difficulty found during the administration of the pilot test was the fact that the examiner had to immediately transcribe the responses on the response sheet. The accuracy of the response was questionable because children spoke at different rates and volumes. Modifications to the procedures were made resulting in the decision of audio record all responses for the elicitation task as discussed previously.
6.3 Procedures
Initial interviews with the directors of potential participating schools were carried out to explain the study and obtain approval to send information to the parents. Once the institution approved participation in the study, teachers sent information letters, consent forms and parent questionnaires to the parents of children who were in the targeted age range.
Parents returned signed consent forms and completed parent questionnaires once they consented to their child’s participation in the study. Parents were provided with contact information for the researcher should they have any questions. Children were asked if they wanted to participate in the study and verbal assent was obtained in every case, except for two children who did not want to participate in the study and were therefore not included. Their parents were informed that their children had declined to participate in the study. 62 All testing was conducted individually in a quiet room provided by the schools. The testing was completed in one session of 40 to 60 minutes depending on the age of the child.
Older children completed the testing more quickly than younger children. The hearing screening was completed first as it was a measure for inclusion in the study. Two children did not pass the hearing screening and were therefore not included in the study. They were asked to repeat the hearing screening in three months. Similarly, children who the investigator considered to be performing below expectations for the task were referred for speech and language assessment, based on her clinical skills as a certified speech-language pathologist.
The TVIP was administered first to establish rapport with the children. The elicitation task followed the TVIP and the testing session ended with the story retelling task. Children received stickers at the end of each task and all the children in the participating classrooms received an ice cream when the testing was completed in the school. See Appendix 12 for information letters, parental consent and child assents script.
6.4 Reliability
Point to point inter-rater reliability was calculated for transcription of the elicitation task, and on 10% of the language samples including the transcription of the narratives, and the segmentation and coding of grammatical errors. The rater was a native speaker of Spanish from Colombia with a bachelor’s degree in graphic design and without a linguistic background. She received three hours of training on language sample transcription and coding. 63 Using the random.org web page (www.random.org), three groups of 11 children each were randomly selected for reliability analyses. The first group was used to calculate reliability for the transcription of the elicitation task. The second group was used to calculate reliability for narrative transcription. The last group was used to calculate T-unit segmentation and grammatical error coding. Disagreements were resolved in every case by consensus between the raters. Point to point reliability for these test is provide in Table 11 below.
Table 11. Point to Point Reliability
Point to point reliability % of agreement Transcription for elicitation task 92.90 Transcription for narratives 94.16 T-unit segmentation 92.15 Grammatical error coding 95.18 64 7. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Results from this investigation are presented in three sections. Section one (7.1) includes results from the TVIP and the parent questionnaires. Section two (7.2) presents the results for the developmental language measures (number of T-units, mean length of T-units in words, subordination index, and grammatical errors per T-unit). Section three (7.3) shows the results for the developmental trends in the acquisition of grammatical structures.
7.1.1 Test de Vocabulario en Imágenes TVIP
Descriptive analyses for the standard scores on the TVIP indicated that the 3-year-old group had an average performance of 107.58 (SD= 10.56), the 4-year-old group had an average value of 111.20 (SD= 13.90), and the 5-year-old group had an average value of 103.50 (SD=
16.62) (See Table 12). The 4-year-old group had the highest mean for the TVIP, although the difference, when compared to the other two groups, did not reach significance [F (2,110)
=2.96, p=.058].
Table 12. Descriptive Statistics for Standard Scores on TVIP Group N Mean SD Range 3 38 107.58 10.56 82.00 – 131.00 4 40 111.20 13.90 86.00 – 145.00 5 36 103.50 16.62 68.00 – 136.00 Total 114 107.56 14.10 68.00 – 145.00
Two of the children in the 3 year-old group scored more than one standard deviation below the mean. The TVIP test result of one of these children was unscorable because the raw score was zero, and there is no standard score for this value. This child was removed from the TVIP statistical analysis but was included in all further analyses. All children in the four-year-old group scored within one standard deviation of the mean. In the five-year-old group, five 65 children scored more than one standard deviation below the mean, with scores ranging from
68 to 84. The data for the 4- and 5-year-old group were more widely distributed than the data from the 3-year-old group (see Figure 4). These data showed an overall normal distribution as is indicated for normative data collection.
Age 3
Age 4
Age 5
Figure 4. TVIP standard score distribution per age group
7.1.2 Parent Questionnaire
The response rate for the parent questionnaire was 89.6% (N=103). The 10.4% who did not return the questionnaire were eliminated from this analysis but included in all other analyses.
The parent questionnaire was filled out by mothers (78.6%), fathers (11.7%), grandmothers 66 (3.9%), and grandfathers (1%). Five percent of the questionnaires had no answer to the question regarding who filled out the questionnaire, but they were nevertheless included in the analysis. Descriptive statistics indicated that the mean value for the Parental Report of Speech and Language Problems (PRSLP) was 4.80 (SD= 4.37) for the 3-year-old group, 4.02 (SD=
4.25) for the 4-year-old group, and 3.45 (SD= 3.14) for the 5-year-old group (See Figure 5).
These scores represented the level of parental concern regarding speech and language development. A score of zero represented not being at all concerned. The scores from the
PRSLP were assigned to two categorical variables: low and high level of parental concern regarding speech and language problems of their child. Using Restrepo (1998) mean values for normal developing children, scores from 0 to 8 were assigned to the low level of parental concern category. A score of 9 or higher was assigned to the high level of parental concern category. See Table 13 for data frequency by age groups. No significant association was found between age groups and the levels of parental concern regarding speech and language problems of their child [_2(2)=.348, p=.939].
Figure 5. Means and two standard deviations for PRSLP across age groups. 67 Descriptive statistics for the Family History of Speech and Language Problems
(FHSLP) indicated that the average score for the 3-year-old group was 3.50 (SD= 4.14), for the 4-year-old group was 3.19 (SD= 3.12), and for the 5-year-old group was 2.72 (SD= 4.04).
The score on the FHSLP represents the number of concerns or potential problem areas with respect to speech and language problems in the family of the child. The scores from the
FHSLP were assigned to two categorical variables: low and high level of frequency of speech and language problems in the family. Using an average between Restrepo’s data and the means for FHSLP found in this investigation, scores below 7 were assigned to the low frequency of speech and language problems in the family category. Conversely, a score of 7 or higher was assigned to the high frequency of speech and language problems in the family category. See Table 13 for data frequency by age groups. No significant association was found between age groups and the frequency of speech and language problems in the family
[_2(2)=.348, p=.939].
Table 13. Frequency data by age group for the PRSLP Questionnaire Level 3-year olds 4-year olds 5-year olds
PRSLP Low 29 30 29
High 6 5 4
FHSLP Low 21 25 28
High 9 6 5
7.1.3. Discussion of the results from the TVIP and parent questionnaire
The data from the TVIP showed that the Colombian SS-children scored slightly higher than the mean standard score of 100 set by the test. Although the mean score was higher than 68 expected, the frequency of the data when graphically presented showed a bell shaped curve indicating a normal distribution of scores. This normal distribution indicates that children with different language skills were represented in the sample collected. The fact that the data are normally distributed is crucial for this investigation because one of the main interests was to capture a range of language skills that could include typically developing children as well as children with possible language disorders as it is indicated in normal normative samples
(Ukrainetz, 1996).
The TVIP identified 7 children (3 girls and 4 boys) who performed more than one standard deviation below the mean. These children represented 6% of the current sample, which approximates the estimate of 7% for the proportion of language disordered children in
English-speaking contexts (Tomblin, et al., 1997). The low scores obtained on the TVIP do not confirm that these children had a language disorder, and additional results regarding their performance on other language tasks would be required to provide information with respect to the language status of these children.
No significant differences were found in TVIP standard scores between the 3-, 4-, and
5-year old SS children. Because standard scores were used for these analyses, vocabulary scores were not expected to increase with age. However, the data in the 5-year-old group were more widely distributed and the mean in the 4-year-old group was 11.2 above the mean set by the test. Considering that the standard deviation of the test is 15, this difference is worthy of further consideration.
One reason for the possible differences found in the performance of Colombian children might be the fact that the test is an adaptation of the English PPVT. The TVIP was 69 thought to be the best available option as a standardized test for the Colombian population because it was normed with Mexican and Puerto Rican SS children. However, this is the first time that this test is reported to have been used with children from a South American SS country. Dunn et al. (1997) reported in the examiner’s manual of the TVIP that special considerations were taken to guarantee that the Spanish words (translated from English) represented the words in the newest Spanish dictionaries at the time the test was adapted.
However, this does not ensure that the words are culturally equivalent. For example, one of the stimulus pages of the examination booklet presents a picture of a kangaroo, a platypus, a weasel, and a stegosaurus. Although the target word kangaroo (canguro) might be known by
Latin American children, the cultural appropriateness of these four animals as a representation of the vocabulary of a Latin American child is questionable. It is possible that children might pick the picture of the kangaroo because it is the only picture they recognize. The equivalence and accuracy of translating tests from English to Spanish has been a topic of considerable discussion in the last decade (e.g., Restrepo & Silverman, 2001) and recommendations have been made to design tests that are linguistically and culturally appropriate for the Hispanic community rather than adapting existing measures. However, until such tests exist on the market, the best alternative for clinicians and researchers is to use the available ones while taking into consideration the possible methodological flaws that this practice entails.
The second task, presented in section 7.1, was the Parental Report of Speech and
Language Problems (PRSLP; Restrepo, 1998). The results from this questionnaire suggested that there were no differences between the age groups on parental perceptions regarding the existence of problems with expressive and receptive language, learning and attention in their 70 children indicating that the three age groups were comparable in this respect. In other words, parental beliefs about the language status of their children did not change with age
(e.g., parents of 3-year-olds were not more worried about the language of their child than parents of 5-year-olds). This seems to be in line with previous findings that parents can provide important information regarding the language status of their child (Fenson et al.,
1993; Rescorla, 1993; O’Neil, 2007).
Restrepo (1998) reported that a group of children identified as normally developing and with an age range of 5;0 to 7;1 had a mean score of 4.7 (SD= 2.76) on the PRSLP. The children in the present study ranged in age from 2;9 to 5;3 and had a mean score of 4.1 (SD=
3.97). The fact that the standard deviation of the children in this study is slightly higher than the standard deviation reported in Restrepo (1998) might be explained by the inclusion of children representing different language levels, not only normally developing children, in this investigation. The findings of the PRSLP are consistent with Restrepo’s results.
The data from the family history of speech and language problems (FHSLP; Restrepo,
1998) suggested that there were no differences between groups on the parental report of history of speech and language problems in the family of the child. Restrepo (1998) reported that the normally developing children in her study had an average score of 9.93 (SD= 7.34) which is considerably higher than the scores of the children in this study (3.12, SD= 3.78).
Possible cultural factors might explain this difference. It is possible that Colombian families are less aware of previous language problems in the family because the concepts of language disorders and language intervention are relatively new areas of development in Colombia as compared to the United States, where Restrepo’s data were collected. 71 The variation in scores might also be explained by possible methodological flaws in this questionnaire. First, the measure contains a total of 105 yes/no questions, and this might be too long to complete accurately. Second, the measure might challenge the memory of the person who is filling out the questionnaire because it asks for facts that might have happened a long time ago (eg. data from the childhood of parents and grand parents). Third, data from grandparents might be not reliable because it is likely that concepts such as special education did not exist at that time.
Careful consideration should be taken when selecting the best possible tools to collect information from Latin American children. Although the TVIP and Parent Questionnaire used in this study provided useful data to describe the children, considerations regarding the cultural appropriateness of these measures should not be disregarded. The process of development of new measures is still in the initial phases for Latin American communities, but there is a growing interest in this linguistic group that might facilitate the advancement of this psychometric domain. The following chapters contribute to the paucity of assessment tools and norms that are culturally and linguistically appropriate for Hispanic communities.
7.2 Developmental language measures
This section presents the findings related to typical values for number of T-units (NU-TU), mean length of T-units in words (MLTU), subordination index (SUB-I), and grammatical errors per T-unit (GRE-TU) measures for the 3-, 4-, and 5-year old monolingual SS children.
Descriptive statistics were calculated to characterize the typical values for NU-TU, MLTU,
SUB-I, and GRE-TU for the three groups. Analyses of Variance (ANOVAs) were then carried out to determine whether statistically significant differences existed between the 72 groups, with age group as the independent variable and NU-TU, MLTU, SUB-I and GRE-
TU as the dependent variables. When statistically significant differences were found, post-hoc comparisons using contrast coefficients were used to find the source of the difference. Two different comparisons were made: one comparing 3-year-olds with 4-year-olds and a second comparing 4-year-olds with 5-year-olds. Symbols such as =, <, and > will be used to represent the statistically significant differences found between the age groups. For example, the notation 3<(4=5) should be interpreted as meaning that 3-year-olds performed significantly lower than 4- and 5- year olds, with no changes between the latter two groups.
The effect size d (Cohen, 1988) was calculated for each of the comparisons. Tables with the results from the post hoc comparisons and effect sizes are presented at the end of each subsection. Table 17, presented in section 7.2.5 summarizes the descriptive statistics for the four developmental language measures. Bars with + or – 1 SD are used to graphically present the means per group. Correlations among the language measures were also examined and are presented in Appendix 12.
7.2.1 Number of T-Units
Results of the descriptive analysis for NU-TU indicated that 3-year-old SS children produced an average of 15.11 T-units (SD= 8.68), 4-year-old SS children produced on average 25.03 units (SD= 8.30), and 5-year-old SS children produced on average 27.62 T-units (SD= 7.92) during the story retelling task. ANOVA revealed that this difference was statistically significant [F (2,106 = 22.44<.001] and planned comparisons using contrast coefficients revealed that the 3-year-old group was significantly different from the 4-year-old group, but 73 no significant differences were found between 4- and 5-year-old children [3<(4=5)]. See
Table 14 for comparison results and effect sizes.
. Figure 6. Mean performance for NU-TU for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old SS children
Table 14. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for NU-TU. Contrast Groups Results of Planned Comparison Effect Size
3 and 4 t (106) = -5.12, p < .001 d = 1.142
4 and 5 t (106) = -1.33, p = .187 d = .312
Note. 3 = 3 year-old children; 4 = 4 year-old children; 5 = 5 year-old children
7.2.2 Mean Length of T-Units
Results of the descriptive analysis for MLTU indicated that 3-year-old SS children produced an average of 4.69 words per T-unit (SD= 1.50), 4-year-old SS children produced an average of 5.95 words per T-unit (SD= 1.12), and 5-year-old SS children produced an average of 6.69 words per T-unit (SD= 1.42) when retelling the story. ANOVA revealed that this difference was statistically significant [F (2,106) = 19.67, p=<.001]. Planned comparisons using contrast coefficients revealed that the 3-year-old group was significantly different from 74 the 4-year old group and the 4-year-old group was significantly different from the 5-year- old group [3<4<5]. See Table 15 for comparison results and effect sizes.
Figure 7. Mean performance for MLTU for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old SS children
Table 15. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for MLTU Contrast Groups Results of Planned Comparison Effect Size
3 and 4 t (106) = -4.03, p <. 001 d = .962
4 and 5 t (106) = -2.33, p = .022 d = .583
Note. 3 = 3 year-old children; 4 = 4 year-old children; 5 = 5 year-old children
7.2.3 Subordination Index
Results of the descriptive analysis for SUB-I indicated that 3-year-old SS children had an average value of 1.02 (SD= .19), 4-year-old SS children had an average value of 1.12 (SD=
.12), and 5-year-old SS children had an average value of 1.17 (SD= .12) for subordination index on the story retelling task. ANOVA revealed that this difference was statistically significant [F (2,106) = 9.84, p<.001]. Planned comparisons using contrast coefficients 75 revealed that the 3-year-old group was significantly different from the 4-year old group, but no differences were found between 4- and 5-year-old children [3<(4=5)]. See Table 16 for comparison results and effect sizes.
Figure 8. Mean performance for SUB-I for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old SS children
Table 16. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for SUB-I. Contrast Groups Results of Planned Comparison Effect Size
3 and 4 t (106) = -2.81, p = .006 d = .625
4 and 5 t (106) = -1.70, p = .092 d = .500
Note. 3 = 3 year-old children; 4 = 4 year-old children; 5 = 5 year-old children
7.2.4 Grammatical errors per T-unit
Results of the descriptive analysis for GRE-TU indicated that 3-year-old SS children had an average value of .20 (SD= .21) for grammatical errors per T-unit, 4-year-old SS children had an average value of .14 (SD= .10), and 5-year-old SS children had an average value of .16 76 (SD= .13) in the story retelling task. ANOVA revealed that this difference was not statistically significant [3=4=5] [F (2,106) = 1.37, p=.259].
Figure 9. Mean performance for GRE-TU for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old SS children
To further explore the grammaticality of the samples and corroborate the findings from
GRE-TU, a second measure of grammatical accuracy was calculated. A measure of grammatical errors per 100 words was calculated from each one of the samples using the total number of words produced by each child. A very similar pattern to GRE-TU was found with grammatical error per 100 words [F (2,106) = 2.00, p =.140]. No statistical significant differences were found between the groups on either of these grammatical measures.
7.2.5 Summary of developmental language measures based on spontaneous language
NU-TU, MLTU, and SUB-I showed increasing developmental trends across the three age groups. Changes on NU-TU were statistically significant between 3-year-olds and 4- and 5- year olds combined. Changes on MLTU and SUB-I were statistically significant between 3- year-olds, 4-year-olds and 5-year olds. There were no significant differences in the rate of 77 grammatical errors per T-unit produced by 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old SS children. The developmental language measures investigated in this study showed significant correlations among each other. NU-TU, MLTU and SUB-I were significantly correlated (See Appendix
12). However, GRE-TU did not show any significant correlation with the other developmental language measures. These developmental language measures correlated as well with other language tasks, and these correlations are presented in Appendix 12.
Table 17. Descriptive Statistics for Developmental Language Measures Age N Mean SD Range NU-TU 3 36 15.11 8.68 0.00 - 34.00 4 39 25.03 8.30 9.00 - 42.00 5 34 27.62 7.92 9.00 - 43-00 MLTU 3 36 4.69 1.50 0.00 - 7.41 4 39 5.95 1.12 4.15 - 8.16 5 34 6.69 1.42 2.33 - 8.39 SUB-I 3 36 1.02 .19 1.00 – 1.33 4 39 1.12 .12 1.00 – 1.45 5 34 1.17 .12 1.00 – 1.44 GRER- 3 36 .20 .21 0.00 – 0.71 TU 4 39 .14 .10 0.00 - 0.46 5 34 .16 .13 0.03 - 0.56
7.2.6 Discussion of developmental language measures
The data from this investigation provide novel information regarding the development of number of T-units, mean length of T-units in words, subordination index and grammatical errors per T-units for SS children. Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who work with SS children have traditionally used a more subjective approach to narrative language assessment because normative data were not available for this population. The results from this investigation will greatly assist SLPs in their assessment of the language status of referred 78 children. They will be able to use this information to provide more adequate language judgments that include references to normal development.
Mean length of T-units and grammatical errors per T-units have been reported to be good indicators of language disorders in SS children (Restrepo, 1998; Simon-Cereijido &
Gutierrez-Clellen, 2007). The means and standard deviations presented in this investigation for these two measures can serve as a normative reference against which to compare the individual performance of Spanish-speaking children. This represents a significant advancement for the language assessment of SS children and will have an impact on the quality and objectivity of this type of assessment.
As discussed in Chapter 5, a considerable information gap with respect to developmental language measures for preschool SS children exists in the literature. The results of this study contribute to the filling of this gap and to advancing the literature on language acquisition for
3-, 4-, and 5- year old SS children. This is the first study that has examined these particular language structures in a relatively large group of monolingual SS children covering three age ranges. Furthermore, this is the only available study on developmental language measures for
SS children that segments the age groups into brackets of + or – 3 months of the date of birth.
This is different from the information available in the literature where larger variations in the age groupings are typically presented. The strict selection criteria used in this study allowed developmental changes across the age groupings to be shown for some of the structures of interest to the research.
The results from this study are comparable to those presented in some of the studies conducted on SS children previously reviewed. Information provided in Table 18 compares 79 previous findings for the same developmental measures obtained from SS children with the results from this study. It is important to note that only data from the 5-year-old group is presented for comparative purposes, as this is the closest age group to what has been reported in previous studies. A unique contribution of this research is the presentation of the means and standard deviations for these four measures for 3- and 4-year-old SS children in addition to the
5-year-old group.
Table 18. Comparison of Means and Standard Deviations (in parentheses) for Developmental Language Measures Castilla (2008) Gutierrez-Clellen & Restrepo (1998) Simon-Cereijido (Age 5;0) Hofstetter (1994) (Age 6;2) & Gutierrez- (Age 5;0) Clellen (2007) (Age 4;6) NU-TU 27.62 (SD=9.6) 24.3 (SD=19.5) * *
MLTU 6.69 (SD=1.42) 6.5 (SD=.9) 5.6 (SD=.8) 5.7 (SD=1.0)
SUB-I 1.18 (SD=.12) 1.11 (SD=.13) * *
GRE-TU 0.16 (SD=.14) * 0.09 (SD=.05) 0.17 (.04)
Note: * Not reported
The first measure obtained from the language sample was the number of T-units (NU-
TU) that children used to retell the story. A significant developmental change in NU-TU occurred between 3 and 4 years of age, and there was a plateau between 4 and 5 years.
Assuming a normal distribution of these data, it is possible then to suggest that 68% of 3-year- old SS children will produce between 6 and 24 T-units to retell this story based on the same narrative script. Similarly, 68% of 4- and 5-year olds will be expected to produce between 18 and 34 T-units. 80 The hypothesis proposed for NU-TU in section 5 was supported by the results of this study. The mean value for the 5-year-old group was 27.62, which is within 0.5 SD of the mean reported by Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter (24.3, SD=19.5; 1994). These results are consistent with Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter’s (1994) findings for the 5-year-old SS children. It is possible that the plateau of NU-TU used to retell a story was reached at age 4 as
Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter (1994) found no differences in this measure among 5-, 6-, and 8-years old SS children. This will require further investigation.
The developmental changes for MLTU in words were statistically significant for the three age groups, showing a clear developmental increase in the length of T-units produced by
SS children. The data suggested a rough estimate of one additional word per year starting at around four words by age three. The hypothesis proposed for MLTU in section 5 was supported by the data. Five-year-old children had an average value for MLTU of 6.69 which is within 0.5 SD of the mean reported by Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter (6.5, SD=.9; 1994).
Interestingly, Restrepo (1998) reported a lower mean for MLTU for an older group of children than the one found in this investigation. Her study involved 31 SS typically developing children (mean age 6;2, SD= 0;7) who obtained a mean MLTU of 5.6 (SD= .8), which is considerably lower than the mean for the 5-year-old children in this study (6.7; SD=
1.4). This difference might be explained by the methodology used to elicit the language samples. Restrepo (1998) used a combination of picture description, an interview with the child and a story retelling task, which might have led to a lower mean score for MLTU than if only story retelling had been used. This is consistent with previous literature on elicitation techniques in that story retelling tasks have been found to yield to longer utterances than other 81 elicitation techniques (Gazella & Stockman, 2003; Wagner et al. 2002). Another possibility is that the script developed for this study had longer utterances than the one used by Restrepo, which would potentially result in lengthier narratives.
The results of this study are consistent with Simon-Cereijido and Gutierrez-Clellen’s findings (2007) with respect to MLTU for their 4-year-olds. Although their group mean age was 4;6, their results were more similar to the results obtained from the 4-year-olds than to the
5-year-olds in this study. These similarities might be a result of using a story retelling task as sampling technique. The Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter (1994) study also used a story retelling task, and their results for 5-year-old children were similar to the results reported in this investigation.
The results for SUB-I suggested developmental changes among the three age groups.
Three-year olds produced little subordination (1.02), but this value increased with age up to
1.18 by age five. This SUB-I value means that, for a typical 28 T-unit story, a 5 year- old child produced on average five T-units containing subordinated clauses. Although the difference across age groups seems very small, subordination index is a measure with a small range of performance. A value of 1 indicates no subordination, and the production of a subordinated clause in every T-unit would correspond to a value of 2. The script that was read to the children had a SUB-I of 1.47.
The mean value for subordination index for the 5-year old group was 1.18, which falls slightly above 0.5 SD of the mean reported by reported in Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter for their 5-year-olds (1.11 , SD=.13; 1994) and closer to the value they reported for their 6-year- old children (1.18, SD=. 11). Therefore, the results of this study did not support the hypothesis 82 for SUB-I proposed in section 5. Although both studies used a story retelling task to obtain the spontaneous language data, Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter (1994) did not provide information on the SUB-I of their movie script. As was previously stated, the script designed for the present research has a SUB-I of 1.47. This could have impacted the narrative skills of the participating children, resulting in a higher SUB-I in this study.
The results of this study provide novel information on developmental language changes for young children on the SUB-I measure. However, it is important to highlight that there were children in all three age groups who produced a SUB-I of one (meaning no subordination). This may suggest that SUB-I could be a measure of language complexity but might not be able to serve as a potential identifier of language disorders because no subordination seems to be a normal pattern in these young age groups. This measure would likely have a stronger diagnostic potential with older children, avoiding the floor effects found for the young age groups. In fact, Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstteter (1994) reported a SUB-I mean value of 1.23 (SD= .13) for their 8-year-old children, which might be used to identify children in the low extreme of the distribution at this particular age.
Grammatical errors per T-unit has been suggested as a reliable indicator of language disorders in Spanish-speaking children (Restrepo, 1998; Simon-Cereijido & Gutierrez-Clellen,
2007). The results of this investigation suggested that no developmental changes in GRE-TU occurred across the three age groups. Interestingly, regardless of the increase in utterance length with age, the ratio of errors per T-unit did not show changes. No other studies investigating changes in GRE-TU in SS children were available at the time this dissertation was written against which this compare these findings. 83 The mean value for GRE-TU for the 5-year-old group was .16 (SD=.14), which is greater than 0.5 SD of the mean reported by Restrepo (0.09, SD=.05; 1998). Therefore, the results of this study do not support the hypothesis for GRE-TU provided in section 5. The higher mean found in this study might be explained by the fact that Restrepo (1998) had a group of children who had already been identified as being typically developing, while this investigation included a range of children, and may have included children with and without language disorders.
The results of this investigation with respect to GRE-TU are consistent with the findings reported by Simon-Cereijido and Gutierrez-Clellen (2007) for their typically developing four and a half- year old children. Although their grammatical measure represents the percentage of utterances with grammatical errors in their sample, they found a mean value of .17 (SD=
.04), which is very close to the GRE-TU values for 4- and 5-year-old children in this study.
ANOVA showed no change with age for GRE-TU, and correlation analysis showed no significant correlation between GRE-TU and the other developmental measures. This suggests that GRE-TU may not be a developmental measure. However, it may still be useful for the identification of language disorders as previously suggested by Restrepo (1998) and
Simon-Cereijido and Gutierrez-Clellen (2007). Percentages of errors as high as 35% (Simon-
Cereijido & Gutierrez-Clellen, 2007) and 39% (Restrepo, 1998) have been found in SS children with language disorders.
With respect to elicitation techniques, story retelling seems to be an appropriate task to collect complex narratives that allow the examination of NU-TU, MLTU, GRE-TU and SUB-
I in SS children. Although no direct comparisons across elicitation tasks were performed, the 84 results from the developmental language measures suggest that this task is culturally and linguistically appropriate for Spanish-speaking children as previously suggested by Restrepo and Castilla (2007). The script developed for this study elicited narratives that showed increasing language skills across the three age groups. The script used in the story retelling task as a model had 47 T-units with a MLTU of 9.52, and a SUB-I of 1.47.
The results for the developmental language measures in general were consistent with the results of Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter (1994) and Simon-Cereijido and Gutierrez-Clellen
(1997). Although the children who participated in those studies had exposure to and were learning a second language, their developmental language measure results were comparable to those obtained from monolingual children. As previously suggested by Genesee, Paradis and
Crago (2004), it appears that the development of each of the languages of the dual language learner follows a very similar pattern to the language development of monolingual children.
These findings are not confirmed and further research is needed in this area. However, it might be possible that the findings of this investigation could be applied to bilingual children in the future, thus extending the usefulness and applicability of these data to a larger population of children. Further research would be needed to establish the applicability of these findings to bilingual populations.
7.3 Acquisition of Grammatical Structures
This section summarizes results related to the production of clitic object pronouns, articles, plurals and adjectives by SS monolingual children at ages 3, 4 and 5 based on data obtained from both the elicitation and the story retelling tasks. The data from the elicitation task are 85 presented as percentages correct based on the number of tokens tested and are compared to the adult data (n=10). Because the adult data have considerably less variation than the child data, the Brown-Forsythe f test is used to examine differences between means. This test corrects for the inequality of variances across groups. Comparison tests using contrast coefficients were used to find the source of any significant differences. Three sets of comparison were run: one comparing 3-year-olds with 4-year-olds, a second one comparing 4- year-olds to 5-year olds, and a last one comparing 5-year-olds to adults. Tables with the comparison results and effect sizes are presented for each paired grouped at the end of each grammatical structure sub section. As in the previous sections, symbols such as =, <, and > are used to represent the statistically significant differences between the age groups such that
3<4<5 should be interpreted as indicating that 3-year-olds performed significantly lower than
4- year-olds and 4-year-olds performed significantly lower than 5-year-olds. This notation is used in the text for the elicitation task only. Table 25 presents this notation for the spontaneous language data as well. Bars representing mean percentages and standard deviations per age group are again used to graphically illustrate the data.
The data from the language sample are presented in the form of two different measures.
First, the raw counts of grammatical structures are presented in order to provide information on how many times a child used a specific structure during the story retelling task. Because the stories differed in length across the age groups, a ratio of counts per number of T-units is also used to provide further information about the productive use of the grammatical structures of interest in this study. The following example might help the reader to better understand these two measures. A 3-year-old child might use three adjectives in a story 86 compared to a 5-year–old, who uses nine adjectives. If we examine the raw counts, the 5- year-old is producing more adjectives than the 3-year-old. However, if we take into account the length of the story, the 3-year-old produces nine T-units compared to the 5-year-old who produces 27 T-units. If we use a ratio of counts per T-unit, both children are producing one adjective per three T-units, or a ratio of 0.33. The differences between these two measures and their implications will be discussed in Section 7.3.9.
7.3.1 Direct object pronouns
Results from both the elicitation task and the language sample showed an increase in the productive use of direct object pronouns with age. Data from the elicitation task indicated that the 3-year-old group produced 32.2% (SD= 26.0) of target clitic pronouns, the 4-year-old group produced 65.0% (SD= 24.8), the 5-year old group produced 69.6% (SD= 23.2), and the adult group produced 98.0% (SD= 3.5). This difference was statistically significant [Brown-
Forsythe f= (3,109.1) = 36.6, p<.001]. Post hoc analysis using contrast coefficients and adjusting for inequality of variances indicated that the mean percentage of the 3-year-old group was significantly different from the mean percentage of the 4- and 5-year-olds, and the mean percentage of the adult group was significantly higher than the mean percentage of the
5-year olds [3<(4=5) Figure 10. Means and standard deviations of direct object pronoun use- Elicited language Table 19 presents the descriptive results for direct object pronoun use in spontaneous language. These data, illustrated in Figure 11, suggested a developmental trend in the productive use of direct object pronouns [F (2,106) = 10.88, p<.001]. Post hoc analyses revealed that the three groups of children were significantly different from each other. However, no differences among the three age groups were found when a ratio of direct object pronouns per T-unit was used for the analysis [F (2,106) = 1.47, p=.234]. See Table 20 for comparison results and effect sizes. Table 19. Descriptive Statistics for Direct Object Pronoun Use – Spontaneous Language Group Mean SD Range DO pronouns 3 1.33 1.67 .00 – 7.00 4 2.60 2.07 .00 – 9.00 5 3.71 2.58 .00 – 11.00 DO pronouns per 3 .09 .12 .00 – .50 T-unit 4 .11 .09 .00 – .33 5 .13 .08 .00 – .28 Note. DO= Direct Object 88 Figure 11. Means and SD bars for direct object pronouns (1st panel=raw counts, 2nd panel= counts per T-unit) –Spontaneous language Table 20. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Direct Object Pronouns Analysis Contrast groups Results planned comparison Effect size Elicitation 3 and 4 t (77.75) = 10.96, p < .001 d = 1.263 Task 4 and 5 t (71.85) = -.818, p = .416 d = .184 5 and Adults t (38.57) = -6.93, p < .001 d = 2.117 Raw counts 3 and 4 t (106) = -2.55, p = .012 d = .609 4 and 5 t (106) = -2.23, p < .028 d = .436 Counts per T- 3 and 4 t (106) = -.919, p = .360 d = .182 unit 4 and 5 t (106) = -.842, p = .401 d = .250 Note. 3 = 3 year-old children; 4 = 4 year-old children; 5 = 5 year-old children 7.3.2 Reflexive pronouns Results from the elicitation task revealed that children in the 3-year-old group produced 37.4% (SD= 33.7) of obligatory reflexive pronouns, children in 4-year-old group produced 69.2% (SD= 31.7), children in 5-year-old group produced 75.7% (SD= 31.4) and the adult group produced 93.3% (SD= 8.6). Figure 12 shows the mean percentages and standard 89 deviations per group. The production of reflexive pronouns followed an increasing developmental trend that was statistically significant [Brown-Forsythe f= (3,112.8) = 18.2, p<.001]. Post hoc analyses revealed statistically significant differences between the 3-year-old group, the 4- and 5-year old groups together, and the adult group [3<(4=5) Figure 12 . Means and standard deviations for reflexive pronoun use- Elicited language. Results regarding reflexive pronoun use obtained from the story retelling task are presented in Table 21. These results showed a statistically significant difference in the production of reflexives among the groups [F (2,106) = 6.25, p=.003]. The developmental change was observed between 3 and 4 years of age and no further change was observed between the 4- and 5- year age groups (See Figure 13). This statistical significance was not upheld when reflexives per T-units were used [F (2,106) = .92, p=.404]. See Table 22 for comparison results and effect sizes. 90 Table 21. Descriptive Statistics for Reflexive Pronouns -Spontaneous Language Group Mean SD Range Reflexive 3 5.33 3.78 .00 – 13.00 pronouns 4 8.07 4.11 .00 – 16.00 5 8.53 4.51 .00 – 17.00 Reflexive 3 .35 .21 .00 – .79 pronouns per T- 4 .33 .15 .00 – .67 unit 5 .30 .13 .00 – .50 Figure 13. Mean and SD bars for reflexive pronoun use (1st panel=raw counts, 2nd panel= counts per T-unit) – Spontaneous language Table 22. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Reflexive Pronouns Analysis Contrast groups Results planned comparison Effect size Elicitation 3 and 4 t (73.0) = -4.24, p < .001 d = .945 Task 4 and 5 t (71.3) = .88, p = .380 d = .205 5 and Adults t (43.0) = -2.95, p = .005 d = .880 Raw counts 3 and 4 t (106) = -2.869, p = .005 d = .609 4 and 5 t (106) = -.466, p = .642 d = .436 Counts per T- 3 and 4 t (106) = .580, p = .563 d = .182 unit 4 and 5 t (106) = .803, p = .424 d = .250 Note. 3 = 3 year-old children; 4 = 4 year-old children; 5 = 5 year-old children 91 7.3.3 Indirect object pronouns Results from the elicitation task showed a developmental increase in the use of indirect objects with 3-year-olds using 5.4% (SD= 14.7) indirect object pronouns in obligatory contexts, 4 year-olds using 29.1% (SD= 34.3) indirect object pronouns, 5-year olds showing 40.1% (SD= 42.7) indirect object pronoun use, and adults using 63.3% (SD= 36.7) indirect object pronouns. This difference was statistically significant [Brown-Forsythe f= (3, 50.8) = 10.8, p<.001]. Figure 14 shows the increasing developmental pattern in the productive use of this grammatical structure. Post hoc analyses using contrast coefficients showed that the changes were significant between 3-years old, 4- and 5-years old together, and the adult group [3<(4=5) Figure 14. Means and standard deviations for indirect object pronoun use- Elicited language The data from the language samples, presented in Table 23, showed a significant difference in the raw counts of indirect object pronouns used by 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old SS children [F (2,106) = 4.63, p=.012]. Post hoc analyses indicated that a significant change occurred 92 between 3 and 4 years of age. This significant difference was not upheld once the ratio of indirect object pronouns per number of T-units was compared [F (2,106) = 1.28, p=.282]. Figure 15 illustrates the data from spontaneous language. Table 24 presents the comparison results and effect sizes. Table 23. Descriptive Statistics for Indirect Object Pronouns - Spontaneous Language Group Mean SD Range Indirect object 3 1.31 1.86 .00 – 8.00 pronouns 4 2.60 2.53 .00 – 11.00 5 2.74 2.09 .00 – 8.00 Indirect object 3 .07 .10 .00 – .47 pronouns per T- 4 .11 .09 .00 – .40 unit 5 .10 .08 .00 – .36 Figure 15. Mean and SD bars for indirect object pronoun use (1st panel=raw counts, 2nd panel= counts per T-unit) – spontaneous language 93 Table 24. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Indirect Object Pronouns Analysis Contrast groups Results planned comparison Effect size Elicitation 3 and 4 t (52.8) = -4.24, p < .001 d = .964 Task 4 and 5 t (65.8) = .88, p = .191 d = .311 5 and Adults t (16.4) = -2.95, p = .042 d = .568 Raw counts 3 and 4 t (106) = -2.53, p = .013 d = .583 4 and 5 t (106) = .283, p = .778 d = .059 Counts per T- 3 and 4 t (106) = -1.47, p = .143 d = .300 unit 4 and 5 t (106) = -.152, p = .879 d = .037 Note. 3 = 3 year-old children; 4 = 4 year-old children; 5 = 5 year-old children 7.3.4 Adjectives Results from the elicitation task showed a developmental increase in the use of adjectives across the three age groupings. The 3-year-old group produced 33.1% (SD= 29.6) adjectives in obligatory contexts in contrast with the 4- and 5- year-old groups who produced 69.2% (SD= 26.1) and 79.4% (SD= 25.1) respectively, and the adults who produced 98.3% (SD= 3.51) adjectives in the elicitation task. This difference was statistically significant [Brown- Forsythe f= (3, 106.4) = 36.8, p<.001]. Figure 16 graphically presents the developmental increase seen in the use of adjectives. Post hoc analyses indicated that a significant developmental change occurred between the 3-years old and the 4- and 5-years old together. Adults were significantly different from the 4- and 5-year old children [3<(4=5) Other types of responses to the elicitation task for adjectives are presented in Appendix 9. The most frequent other response produced by children was the omission of the adjective. 94 Figure 16. Means and SD for adjective use- Elicited language The productive use of adjectives showed a developmental trend in spontaneous language when raw counts of adjective usage were analyzed [F (2,106) = 11.95, p<.001] (See Table 25 for descriptive data). Post hoc analyses revealed that the significant change occurred between 3 years and 4 years of age. No changes were found between the 4-year-old and the 5- year-old children. This change remained significant when the ratio of adjectives per T-unit was used [F (2,106) = 6.59, p=.002], where the 3 year-old children produced fewer adjectives per T-unit than the 4- and 5-year old children. Figure 17 illustrates these findings. Table 25 presents the comparison results and effect sizes. Table 25. Descriptive Statistics for Adjective Use - Spontaneous Language Group Mean SD Range Adjectives 3 .83 1.29 .00 – 5.00 4 3.00 2.87 .00 – 11.00 5 3.35 2.57 .00 – 10.00 Adjectives per T- 3 .05 .08 .00 – .25 unit 4 .11 .09 .00 – .29 5 .11 .07 .00 – .26 95 Figure 17. Mean and SD bars for adjective use (1st panel=raw counts, 2nd panel= counts per T-unit) – Spontaneous language Table 26. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Adjectives Analysis Contrast groups Results planned comparison Effect size Elicitation 3 and 4 t (71.7) = -5.64, p < .001 d = 1.222 Task 4 and 5 t (70.3) = -1.70, p = .094 d = .390 5 and Adults t (36.9) = -4.26, p <.001 d = 1.324 Raw counts 3 and 4 t (106) = -3.97, p < .001 d = 1.043 4 and 5 t (106) = .637, p = .525 d = .122 Counts per T- 3 and 4 t (106) = -3.23, p = .002 d = .667 unit 4 and 5 t (106) = -.065, p = .948 d = .014 Note. 3 = 3 year-old children; 4 = 4 year-old children; 5 = 5 year-old children 7.3.5 Indefinite articles The results for indefinite articles obtained from the elicitation task showed a small developmental increase in the productive use of indefinite articles among 3- 4- and 5-year-old children. As shown in Figure 18, children in the 3-year-old group produced 45.3% (SD= 96 23.9) indefinite articles in obligatory contexts, the 4-year-old group produced 53.4% (SD= 22.2) and the 5-year old group produced 47.0% (SD= 26.4). In contrast, adults produced 80% (SD= 23.6) of indefinite articles. This difference between the 3 child groups and the adult group was statistically significant [Brown-Forsythe f= (3, 69.0) = 5.9, p=.001]. Post hoc analyses indicated that the source of the significance was between the 3- and 4-year-olds with no change between 4- and 5-year-olds. Adults performed significantly higher than 5-year-olds [(3<(4=5) Figure 18. Means and SD for indefinite article use- Elicited language There was an increasing productive use of indefinite articles during the story retelling task as shown by increases in the raw count of indefinite articles in spontaneous language [F (2,106) 97 = 18.7, p < .001] ( See Figure 19 and Table 27). Post hoc analysis indicated that the three groups were statistically different. This difference across the three groups was upheld when the ratio per T-units was used [F (2,106) = 10.6, p < .001]. Table 28 presents the comparison results and effect sizes. Table 27 - Descriptive Statistics for Indefinite Article Use - Spontaneous Language Group Mean SD Range Indefinite articles 3 1.05 1.57 .00 – 5.00 4 2.61 2.16 .00 – 8.00 5 4.79 3.62 .00 – 12.00 Indefinite articles 3 .06 .08 .00 – .33 per T-unit 4 .10 .09 .00 – .47 5 .17 .12 .00 – .48 Figure 19. Mean and SD bars for indefinite article use (1st panel=raw counts, 2nd panel= counts per T-unit) – Spontaneous language 98 Table 28. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Indefinite Articles Analysis Contrast groups Results planned comparison Effect size Elicitation 3 and 4 t (19.7) = 7.96, p < .001 d = .297 Task 4 and 5 t (66.8) = .95, p = .343 d = .207 5 and Adults t (16.0) = -3.80, p = .002 d = 1.256 Raw counts 3 and 4 t (106) = -2.63, p = .010 d = .726 4 and 5 t (106) = -3.62, p <. 001 d = .602 Counts per T- 3 and 4 t (106) = -2.03, p = .045 d = .556 unit 4 and 5 t (106) = -2.68, p = .008 d = .500 Note. 3 = 3 year-old children; 4 = 4 year-old children; 5 = 5 year-old children 7.3.6 Definite articles Results from the elicitation task suggested that children used few definite articles to complete the elicitation task, in spite of this construction having been modeled. Three-year old children produced 16.5% (SD= 19.2) definite articles in obligatory contexts, 4-year-olds produced 25.6% (SD= 24.8) definite articles, and 5-year-olds produced 28.1% (SD= 28.0) definite articles to complete the task. In contrast, adults produced definite articles on average 93.3% (SD= 10.24) of the time in obligatory contexts (see Figure 20). The difference across the four groups was statistically significant [Brown-Forsythe f= (3,106.4) = 35.8, p= <001]. The source of the significance was found to exist between the three groups of children and the adults [(3=4=5) 30). Children produced large percentages of indefinite articles to complete this task. See Appendix 11 for definite article production and other responses to the elicitation task. 99 Figure 20. Means and SD for definite article use- Elicited language Results from the language sample are presented in Table 29. These results suggested that there was an increasing developmental trend in the productive use of definite articles. This increasing pattern was shown for the raw count of definite articles [F (2,106) = 15.52, p<.001] and for the ratio of definite articles per T-unit [F (2,106) = 4.0, p=.021]. For both of these measures, the source of the significance was determined to exist between 3-year-old and 4- and 5-year-old groups together. Refer to Figure 21 for an illustration of these findings. Table 29. Descriptive Statistics for Definite Article Use - Spontaneous Language Group Mean SD Range Definite articles 3 10.28 7.69 .00 – 39.00 4 19.54 11.12 4.00 – 49.00 5 22.59 9.84 .00 – 49.00 Definite articles 3 .60 .32 .00 – 1.46 per T-unit 4 .77 .30 .24 – 1.69 5 .81 .31 .11 – 1.36 100 Figure 21. Mean and SD bars for definite article use (1st panel=raw counts, 2nd panel= counts per T-unit) – Spontaneous language Table 30. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Definite Articles Analysis Contrast groups Results planned comparison Effect size Elicitation 3 and 4 t (71.2) = -4.24, p = .081 d = .408 Task 4 and 5 t (68.4) = .88, p = .692 d = .021 5 and Adults t (40.0) = -2.95, p < .001 d = 3.418 Raw counts 3 and 4 t (106) = -4.13, p < .001 d = .957 4 and 5 t (106) = -1.34, p = .183 d = .290 Counts per T- 3 and 4 t (106) = -2.16, p = .033 d = .500 unit 4 and 5 t (106) = -.584, p = .561 d = .161 Note. 3 = 3 year-old children; 4 = 4 year-old children; 5 = 5 year-old children 7.3.7 Plurals Results from the elicitation task suggested that there was an increasing developmental trend in the use of plurals across the age groupings (See Figure 22). Three-year-old children produced 47.6 % (SD= 32.6) plurals in obligatory contexts, 4-year-old children produced 77.6% (SD= 22.6), 5-year-old children produced 85.0% (SD= 17.1) and adults produced 98.75% (SD= 3.9) plurals. This difference was statistically significant [Brown-Forsythe f= (3, 87.6) = 27.6, 101 p<.001]. Post hoc analyses indicated that the source of the difference was between the 3- year-olds and the 4- and 5-year-olds together. Furthermore, adults performed significantly better than children on this task [3<(4=5) Figure 22. Means and SD for plural use - Elicited language Results from the language sample, presented in Table 31, indicated that there was an increasing developmental trend in the production of articles [F (2,106) = 6.54, p=.002]. This source of the difference was found to exist between 3- and 4-year-old children with no significant change between 4- and 5-years of age. When the ratio of plurals per T-unit was used for the analysis, this difference remained significant [F (2,106) = 4.50, p=.013]. Figure 23 illustrates these findings and Table 32 shows the comparison results and effect sizes. Table 31. Descriptive Statistics for Plurals - Spontaneous Language 102 Group Mean SD Range Plural 3 .25 .65 .00 – 3.00 4 .90 1.13 .00 – 4.00 5 1.24 1.56 .00 – 6.00 Plural per T-unit 3 .01 .03 .00 – .18 4 .04 .05 .00 – .19 5 .04 .05 .00 – .23 Figure 23. Mean and SD bars for plural use (1st panel=raw counts, 2nd panel= counts per T- unit) – Spontaneous language Table 32. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Plurals Analysis Contrast groups Results planned comparison Effect size Elicitation 3 and 4 t (63.7) = -4.62, p < .001 d = 1.083 Task 4 and 5 t (70.1) = -1.61, p = .113 d = .375 5 and Adults t (42.3) = 4.36, p < .001 d = 1.307 Raw counts 3 and 4 t (106) = -2.34, p = .021 d = .600 4 and 5 t (106) = -.539, p = .591 d = .120 Counts per T- 3 and 4 t (106) = -2.38, p = .019 d = .719 unit 4 and 5 t (106) = -1.25, p = .211 d = .224 Note. 3 = 3 year-old children; 4 = 4 year-old children; 5 = 5 year-old children 7.3.8 Elicitation Task Total Score 103 A total score for the elicitation task was calculated by adding the correct production of direct object pronouns, indirect object pronouns, reflexive pronouns, definite articles, indefinite articles, and plurals. Descriptive statistics for the total task score are presented in Table 33. There was a statistical significant difference between the groups [Brown-Forsythe f= (3, 112.8) = 58.3, p< .001]. The maximum possible score was 69. Post hoc analyses indicated that the source of the difference was between the 3-year-olds and the 4- and 5-year- olds together. Furthermore, adults performed significantly better than children on this combination of tasks [3<(4=5) TU, PRSLP, TVIP raw and standard scores were found when controlling for age. Refer to Appendix 12 for correlation data. Table 33. Descriptive Statistics for Total Elicitation Task Group Mean SD Range Total Elicitation 3 22.1 11.3 .00 – 42.00 Task 4 38.0 10.3 15.00 – 54.00 5 40.7 10.5 8.00 – 55.00 Adults 61.7 3.5 56.00 – 67.00 Figure 24. Means and SD for the total score on the Elicitation Task Table 34. Effect Sizes and Planned Comparisons for Total Score on the Elicitation task 104 Contrast Groups Results of Planned Comparison Effect Size 3 and 4 t (72.4) = -6.38, p <.001 d = 1.402 4 and 5 t (69.2) = 1.11, p =.267 d = .259 5 and Adults t (41.1) = -9.87, p < .001 d = 2.985 Note. 3 = 3 year-old children; 4 = 4 year-old children; 5 = 5 year-old children 7.3.9 Summary of Results Section 7.3 presented the findings for usage of direct object pronouns, indirect object pronouns, reflexive pronouns, adjectives, definite articles, indefinite articles, and plurals obtained from both the elicitation and the story retelling tasks. The results obtained from the different tasks were relatively consistent across the various grammatical structures tested. For elicited language, it was almost always the case that the developmental changes observed occurred between 3- and 4-years of age, with no additional change between 4- and 5 years of age. This developmental pattern was seen for direct object pronouns, indirect object pronouns, reflexive pronouns, adjectives, indefinite articles and plurals. No changes in definite article use were seen between 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. The adults always performed significantly better than the children in this study, indicating that the children in these age groupings had not yet attained adult performance levels for the structures tested. A similar pattern to the elicited responses was found with respect to the raw counts of grammatical structures used in spontaneous language. Significant changes always occurred between 3- and 4-years of age, with no developmental changes occurring between 4 and 5 for indirect object pronouns, reflexive pronouns, adjectives, definite articles, and plurals. There were significant changes observed between the three age groups for direct object pronouns and indefinite 105 articles, however. Mixed results were found when controlling for story length by using the grammatical structures per T-unit analyses. Using these measures, no changes were seen in direct object pronouns, indirect object pronouns, and reflexives between the age groups. For definite articles, indefinite articles, adjectives and plurals, the changes showed the same patterns as for the raw count of grammatical structures. Omission was the most common other response type to the elicitation task for almost all grammatical structures. Table 35 presents a summary of the patterns observed across the language structures across the various analyses. Table 35. Summary of Group Comparison Results Grammatical structure Elicitation task Raw count Raw count per Spontaneous T-unit Direct object pronouns 3<(4=5) Table 36 summarizes the overall findings of section 7.3. There are two rows per grammatical structure in the table. The first row contains the data from the elicitation task and the second row contains the data obtained from spontaneous language. Mean group averages were used when no significant difference were found between any two groups. Asterisks (*) were used to show that the same pattern was found for both spontaneous language raw counts and counts per T-unit. 106 7.3.10 Discussion of development of grammatical structures A variety of terms are used interchangeably but nevertheless unsystematically in the language acquisition literature to refer to the productive use of grammatical structures during the language development period. More specifically, there are differing interpretations regarding what constitutes acquisition across various studies. For some researchers, acquisition is defined as the first productive use of a grammatical structure regardless of accuracy, while for others, acquisition occurs once a level of 90% accurate production has been attained. For the purpose of the present investigation, and following Paradis and Genesee’s position (1997), acquisition is considered as a continuous process that starts when the child uses a grammatical structure for the first time until the point at which the child is able to produce the structure in obligatory context with very few errors. This last stage should closely resemble accuracy levels found in adult production. From the results of this study it possible to conclude that SS children who are 3-, 4-, and 5- years old are still in the process of acquiring the grammatical structures tested here. There were differences in performance between the children and the adults on the elicitation task for each of the grammatical structures examined. Although 4-and 5-year olds were producing the grammatical structures investigated in this study with high percentages of accuracy, they were still not performing as accurately as adults on any of these of language tasks. Using adult data as a maturation goal helped to show that, even in adult production there is still some variation, as illustrated by the fact that none of the grammatical structures reached 100% accuracy in Table 36. Summary of Findings for Grammatical Structures Structure 3 years old 4 years old 5 years old 107 Direct object Productive use 32% Productive use 68% pronouns in obligatory contexts in obligatory contexts 1 per story 3 per story 4 per story Indirect object Productive use 5% Productive use 25% pronouns 1 per story 2 per story Reflexive Productive use 37% Productive use 63% pronouns in obligatory contexts in obligatory contexts 5 per story 8 per story Indefinite Productive use 45% Productive use 50% articles 1 per story* 3 per story* 5 per story * Definite Productive use 24% articles in obligatory contexts 10 per story* 20 per story* 23 per story * Adjectives Productive use 33% Productive use 74% in obligatory in obligatory contexts contexts 0.8 per story* 3 per story * Plurals Productive use 48% Productive use 81.3% in obligatory in obligatory contexts contexts .25 per story* 1 per story* adult production. Child production is in the process of reaching that adult maturational stage, where some small amount of variation will always have a place. The acquisition process is thus still ongoing in the population of children sampled and a few more years might be needed for these grammatical structures to be fully acquired in terms of adult levels of performance. 108 The acquisition process described in this investigation presents data from both elicited and spontaneous language. Although analysis of spontaneous data has traditionally been used in the language acquisition literature, this approach has the potential disadvantage that children may be producing only the grammatical structures that they are comfortable using. Elicited tasks, on the other hand, create contexts where the use of a grammatical structure is either obligatory or felicitous. The use of both types of tasks to examine morphosyntactic acquisition is crucial to describe how children use a specific grammatical structure. For example, the omission rates of direct object pronouns seen in the 3-year-old children were only evident when direct object pronouns were elicited. Most of the studies on Spanish language acquisition that are available include data from either spontaneous or elicited language. This study stands out from previous Spanish acquisition studies in that it included data from both sources, thus providing a more robust picture of the acquisition of the structures of interest to the study across the three groups of children. The data from the spontaneous language were presented using two measures: a raw count of grammatical structures and a ratio of counts of grammatical structure per T-unit. These two measures illustrated two different methodological approaches. Using the first approach based on raw counts of grammatical structures, one can examine the productive use of a particular structure to determine whether there is an increasing, decreasing or stable pattern of use across age groups. Using the second approach, counts per T-unit, one can examine the productive use of the grammatical structures as it relates to the length of the story. In this sense, the second approach is a more conservative one because it takes into account the fact that older children 109 typically create longer stories and makes an attempt to control for the variable of story length in the analysis of the productive use of the grammatical structures. This investigation described the productive use of the various grammatical structures using both elicited and spontaneous language across three age groups. The results of this study provide data that will permit clinicians and researchers to compare the performance of individual children at ages 3, 4 and 5 to the data obtained in this study in order to make developmental observations to determine whether the child is a normal, low, or a high performer with respect to a specific grammatical structure. The results therefore contribute to the potential of SLPs to make more informed and accurate clinical judgments regarding individual performance based on more comprehensive developmental information. The discussion that follows will consider each of the specific structures examined in the study individually. Previous research studies have reported that SS children begin to use direct object pronouns as early as two years of age (Gonzalez, 1978; Shum, Conde & Diaz, 1992). The current investigation advances the previous research by incorporating information regarding the development of direct object pronouns in children between 3- and 5-years of age. When three-year-old children were asked questions that required the obligatory use of direct object pronouns, they responded with a pronoun 32% of the time compared to 4- and 5-year old children who produced a direct object pronoun 68% of the time. This is indicative of a developmental increase in the percentage of direct object use between 3- and 4 year olds. Although 5-year-olds were producing approximately 70% of obligatory direct object pronouns, their responses were still not comparable to adult performance at 93% use. 110 Omission rates of direct object pronouns were approximately 22% for 3-year-olds and 13% for 4- and 5-year-olds (See Appendix 7 for other response types to direct object pronouns). These omission rates are consistent with results reported for Portuguese and French (Costa-Lobo, 2007; Perez-Leroux et al., 2006). Three- and 4-year-old children had approximately 12% errors in gender and number agreement and 5 year-old children had about 9%. It is possible that some of the number agreement errors are caused by the dialectal production of aspirated sounds that form the plural because most errors were found in the production of singular clitics in place of the plural ones (Miller, 2007). Agreement errors were still present by age five, which supports the claims made by Merino (1992) that there is still development in this structure beyond age 5. From spontaneous language we can conclude that children increasingly use more direct object pronouns in their speech with age. Three-year olds used one direct object pronoun on average in spontaneous language, and 3- and 4-year olds used three and four respectively. The coding of omissions of objects in spontaneous language has been questioned as a reliable measure (Pirvulescu, 2006). For example, if the child says ‘I am reading’, he/she could be implying ‘reading’ as the general activity, or ‘reading a book’, which will be then be coded as an omission of an object. The rates of omission in spontaneous language found in this study were very low, perhaps for this reason. The results found in this study for indirect object pronouns and reflexive pronouns were unique in the literature examining the acquisition of Spanish. These novel results suggested that 3-, 4-, and 5- year old children in general used very low percentages of indirect object pronouns as compared to adults. It is important to note that the production of this grammatical 111 structure was not obligatory in the context where it was elicited, but adults nevertheless preferred to use it 63% of the time. Similarly, very few instances of indirect object pronouns were found in spontaneous language. Changes in the productive use of indirect object pronouns in elicited and spontaneous language were significant between 3- and 4-year-olds, but no significant change occurred at age 5. Children produced higher rates of reflexive pronouns than indirect object pronouns. Three- year-old children produced 37% reflexives in obligatory contexts compared to 4- and 5-year- old children who produced 63%. The children performed in a similar way in spontaneous language, where they produced 5 reflexive pronouns by age 3 and 8 reflexive pronouns at age 4 and 5. No research is available for comparison purposes for the results of the production of Spanish reflexive pronouns, making these findings a unique contribution to the literature. With respect to the correct use of adjectives, the results of this investigation suggested that there was a developmental pattern between 3- and 4-years of age in the use of adjectives in both elicited and spontaneous language. No significant changes were observed between 4- and 5-years of age, but adults used significantly more adjectives than children. When the children were three years old they had high rates of adjective omission and very few agreement errors, but as they grew older (4 and 5 years) the omission rates decreased and there were approximately 5% agreement errors. Number errors, as has been discussed before, could be caused by either the developing phonological system or by the Spanish dialect used by the child (Miller, 2007). The increase in the use of adjectives might be explained by the increase in vocabulary during the preschool years (Paul, 2001). However, SS children are not only learning new 112 words, but are also learning number and gender agreement. The agreement rates obtained in the study were high for the 4- and 5-year old children, a finding that supports the findings of Gonzalez (1978), who found that gender and number inflections on articles, nouns, and adjectives were present by age 3;6. The findings for definite and indefinite articles are also of considerable interest. On the one hand, no large changes in the use of articles between the 3- and 5- year olds were observed, however the children in the three groups produced considerably fewer articles than did the adults in elicited language. On the other hand, there was a significant increase in the productive use of articles from age three to age five in spontaneous language. The general interpretation is that in fact children are learning the article system, as indicated by their spontaneous usage, but when forced to produce articles in specific contexts, they continue to have difficulties in usage and are therefore still in the acquisition stage of this structure. With respect to indefinite articles, children used an indefinite article in the elicited obligatory context approximately 50% of the time, as compared to adults who used them 80%. There were significant changes between 3- and 4- years of age, but this change represented only a 5% increase in actual production. This suggests that all children performed similarly. Adults omitted the indefinite article with on average 19% of the time, and children had omission rates of between 30% and 45%. The use of an indefinite article to answer the question “What is this?” might not be obligatory, but still there is a high preference, from the adult language perspective, to use the indefinite article. Thus SS children at age five are still not performing at adult levels in their use of indefinite articles. 113 The results from spontaneous language are contradictory to this finding in that there are greater changes in the use of indefinite articles between 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. Three-year olds used one indefinite article per story, compared to 4- and 5- year olds who produced three and five indefinite articles, respectively. These changes remained significant when the ratio per T-unit measure was used in the calculations. This suggests that the increase in the use of indefinite articles is independent of the length of the story, which makes this a more conservative finding than if only the raw counts were different across age groups, as has been previously discussed. No differences were found between groups of children in the production of definite articles, which were produced with an accuracy level of approximately 24%. Adult performance on this task was at 93%, which was significantly higher than children’s performance. Analyzing the results presented in Appendix 11, it is clear that a large percentage of children were producing indefinite articles to complete this task. This suggests that children are acquiring the article system, but the difference between the definite and indefinite articles is not yet completely clear. They are in fact producing both types of articles, but are making errors in using them in obligatory contexts. There was no available research information in this area for SS speaking children to compare with these results. Children are producing correct definite articles in their spontaneous speech, and this production shows development across the three age groups. Three-year-old children produced about 10 articles per story compared to 4- and 5- year olds who produced 20 and 23, respectively. These changes remained significant when the ratio per T-units was used for the analyses. This pattern of development is very similar to the one found for indirect articles, 114 where changes in productive use were more evident in spontaneous language than in elicited language. The findings related to articles support previous research by Hernandez-Pina (1984), Lopez-Ornat (1997) and Montes (1974) who reported that 3-year-old children were producing a variety of articles, both definite and indefinite. In addition, very few errors of gender and number substitutions were seen, which is consistent with the findings reported by Hernandez- Pina (1984), Montrul (2004) and Perez-Pereira (1991). With respect to the productive use of plurals, the results suggested the there were significant changes in the correct production of the plural between 3- and 4-year-old children, with no significant changes between 4- and 5-years of age. Four- and 5-year old children performed with high percentages of accuracy, but were still not as accurate as adults in their levels of performance. The use of plurals in their spontaneous language was very limited; however, this may have been related to the fact that the story used as a model for the task also contained few instances of plurals. No differences were found between the use of the Spanish plural allomorph /s/ and /es/. These results therefore do not support the findings reported by Kernan and Blount (1966), who found differences in the allomorph production where the allomorph /s/ was acquired earlier than the allomorph /es/. This might be explained by the fact that this study took into account phonological differences and development. For example, the singular form of the word flower is ‘flor’. The plural inflection requires the addition of the allomorph /es/. Children were not penalized if they said ‘flore’ since this production clearly indicates the change from singular to plural and is appropriate in the dialect of Spanish they regularly 115 speak. In general, it seems that the plural is used in elicited language with a high level of accuracy by about 4 years of age. The data from the elicitation task for all grammatical structures does not support the previously stated hypothesis that five-year old children’s performance on the elicitation task for articles, plurals, adjectives and clitic pronouns would resemble adult’s performance on these same structures. There was no construction where the 5-year-old children were performing at the same level as adults in the elicitation task, as indicated by the statistically significant differences between the child and the adult groupings. Additional time may be needed for these structures to be acquired to adult levels. There is still a lot of variability in the children’s performance on the elicitation task as compared to the variability in adult performance levels. Child language data has always been characterized as highly variable, and individual differences among children go a long way in explaining this phenomenon. The data from elicited and spontaneous language showed an important developmental change between 3- and 4-years of age. This change was present for all the structures with the exception of definite article use in elicited language. These findings support Montes’ (1974) claim regarding Spanish-development in Colombian children, which stated that the biggest change in morphological acquisition occurred between 3 and 4 years of age. The results of this investigation provide important insights into two methodological issues when investigating language acquisition in young children. The first concerns the importance of using language elicitation tasks to force the production of grammatical structures that might otherwise go unnoticed in spontaneous language. Errors that were not evident in spontaneous language became very obvious when a specific structure was probed and elicited. Second, 116 three-year-olds produced a number of unintelligible responses, as shown in Appendices 6 to 10; therefore, the recording of their productions for both spontaneous and elicited language was absolutely essential. Using the recordings and obtaining a high degree of transcription and coding reliability helps in determining the accuracy of the recorded data and reduces measurement error. For studies examining language acquisition in young children, such methodological rigour is essential if the results are to be reliable and clinically relevant. 117 8. IMPLICATIONS AND FURTHER DIRECTIONS This investigation examined specific aspects of morphosyntactic development in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old monolingual Spanish-speaking children living in Cali, Colombia. The novel data for the developmental language measures and the acquisition of clitic pronouns, articles, adjectives and plurals for Spanish obtained in the study were presented and discussed in the previous chapter. This information was collected in order to describe and characterize the language acquisition process for a relatively large sample of Spanish-speaking children during their preschool years. Furthermore, this investigation provides important insights into the development of language assessment batteries for languages where insufficient normative information is currently available. The data from this investigation may be used to respond to several important methodological and clinical questions related to language assessment and language acquisition in Spanish. This final section will address five main questions for which the study has important implications. These are: 1) Are there any identifiable stages of morphosyntactic language development in Spanish-speaking children during the preschool years? 2) Would the language battery chosen for this study be adequate for conducting a comprehensive Spanish language assessment? 3) To what extent is the information provided by this investigation applicable to the language assessment of Spanish-speaking children at the present time? 4) What do the results of this investigation tell us about language acquisition in other romance languages? 5) How does one build up a language assessment battery for a language for which insufficient developmental information is available? 118 With respect to the first question, the data from this investigation showed two descriptive developmental stages that were clearly defined by the statistical analyses of performance across the age groups on the various language tasks. The first descriptive developmental stage was at 3 years of age. Children at this age were productively using language and exploring the production of the grammatical structures under examination. The omission of grammatical structures characterized this stage as the most prominent grammatical error. The children produced stories with approximately 15 T-units and about five words per T-unit, but with very few dependent clauses. The second stage identified by this investigation was at ages four and five. Very few significant differences were found between 4- and 5-year olds, which indicated that the children in these age groups had very similar performance on the tasks designed for this study. Children at this stage produced most of the grammatical structures investigated with moderate percentages of accuracy, but were still not comparable with adult production accuracy rates. As omission errors reduced in these age groupings, errors of substitution became more frequent as compared to the 3-year olds. Children produced stories with about 26 T-units and 6 and 7 words per T unit. In general, 4- and 5-year-old children performed better than 3-year- olds on almost every language structure investigated, but still not at the accuracy levels attained by the adults. Question 2 addressed the adequacy of the language battery chosen for this study in conducting an accurate and comprehensive Spanish language assessment of children in the target age range. The inclusion of a standardized vocabulary test, a parental report of speech and language problems, a language sample and a series of elicited language tasks made it 119 possible to find developmental differences between two of the three age groupings and to provide valuable information for language assessment. Recall that both environmental and norm-referenced information are essential to provide adequate language assessments, as identified by Paul (2001). The language battery developed for this study included environmental information from the parent questionnaires, and norm-referenced information from three additional sources: a standardized vocabulary test, a spontaneous language sample and an elicited language task. This battery meets the requirements proposed by Paul (2003) and contributes to existing measures for the assessment of Spanish-speaking children. The combination of these four sources of information has potential utility for the identification of language disorders in children. This battery would need to be validated with a sample of children with known language disorders to examine its applicability as a diagnostic tool. Furthermore, the measures obtained from the various tasks showed strong correlational patterns, which suggested that the measures appear to be consistent in measuring similar constructs. The developmental language measures obtained from the spontaneous language samples showed significant correlations among each other. Number of T-units and mean length of T-units were moderately correlated, which meant that the more utterances a child used to retell a story, the longer the utterances the child produced. Similarly, mean length of T-units and subordination index were highly correlated, which was indeed expected since it is logical to assume that the more subordination exists in a sentence the longer this sentence would be. Interestingly, grammatical errors per T-unit did not correlate with any of the previous developmental language measures. The fact that grammatical errors per T-unit did not show 120 significant correlations with the other spontaneous developmental language measures suggested that the length or complexity of a story had no relationship to overall grammaticality. However, grammatical errors per T-units did negatively correlate with the total score of the elicitation task and the raw score on the TVIP. The more errors per T-unit a child produced, the fewer words he/she identified on the vocabulary task, and the lower score he/she obtained on the elicitation task. Grammatical errors per T-unit did not show developmental changes across age groups. It therefore appears that neither length, complexity, or age are related to the rate of production of errors. This appears to be a novel finding in the child language acquisition literature across languages. Further research will be needed to determine its clinical utility and overall implications. The findings regarding grammatical errors per T-units have important clinical and research implications. There is a lot of discussion in both the research and clinical fields as to whether language disordered children show a delay or a true difference in their patterns of language development (see Leonard 1998 for a complete review of this topic). It has been suggested that a measure of grammatical errors per T-unit has clinical value in the identification of SS children with language disorders (Restrepo, 1998). The results of this investigation suggest that this measure was not sensitive to changes in development, at least with respect to the population and age groups sampled. This seems to suggest that children do not produce more or less errors as they grow older, and therefore, the high rates of errors found in SS children with SLI are truly characteristic of the language disorder per se and are not indicative of a delay in language development in these children. Furthermore, it is possible 121 that SS children with specific language disorders may be delayed in some aspects (e.g., MLTU) and deviant in other aspects of the normal development (e.g., grammatical errors per T-unit). Because this investigation did not include a group of previously identified children with language disorders, these suggestions are hypothetical. Further research would be needed to confirm these observations. The total score on the elicitation task showed significant correlations with most of the other measures investigated in this study. This score was positively correlated with NU-TU, MLTU, and SUB-I, and negatively correlated with GRE-TU. In other words, the higher the score on the elicitation task a child obtained, the fewer grammatical errors that child produced spontaneously and the longer and more complex stories he/she produced. Similarly, the total score on the elicitation task showed strong correlations with the both the raw and the standardized score of the TVIP, suggesting that grammatical and vocabulary development might be interrelated, as it has been suggested by previous research(eg., Tomasello, 2001). Finally, the total score on the elicitation task also correlated with the PRSLP (Parental Report of Speech and Language Problems). The correlations shown between the total score on the elicitation task and NU-TU, MLTU, SUB-I, GRE-TU, PRSLP, and TVIP suggest that the total score on the elicitation task might potentially be used to represent and characterize the language abilities of an individual child. It is possible that the total score on the elicitation task might have clinical applications as a diagnostic tool to identify children with speech and language problems. This total score correlates with various dimensions of language related to vocabulary, length and complexity of spontaneous speech, grammaticality, and parental report of speech and language problems. Further research will be needed to explore the potential use 122 of the elicitation task as a diagnostic tool for the identification of language disorders in children at the ages represented in the study. The data suggested that vocabulary and morphosyntax are interrelated during development. The TVIP raw score showed moderate positive correlations with NU-TU, MLTU and SUB- and a small negative correlation with GRE-TU. The more words a child knows the longer and more complex the stories he/she will produce. Similarly, the TVIP raw score showed a high correlation with the total score of the elicitation task. The more words a child knows the more correct their grammatical productions are when compared to adult standards. This shows the general association between grammar and vocabulary that has been widely discussed in the language literature by such researchers as Hayiou-Thomas, Kovas, Harlaar, Bishop, Dale, & Plomin (2006). However, these data can also be used to argue for the specificity of the relationship between grammar and vocabulary. In fact, some particular grammatical structures are more associated with vocabulary than others, such as is the case of direct object pronouns, which showed stronger correlations with vocabulary than with articles (Castilla, Perez-Leroux, & Eriks-Brophy, 2007). The language battery chosen for this investigation initially proved to be adequate for Spanish language assessment because it was sensitive enough to find language developmental differences among preschool Spanish-speaking children. However, further validation and testing would be required to corroborate these findings. The battery used in this investigation included tasks targeting both environmental and normative information, which are essential for the adequate assessment of language abilities. Furthermore, the measures showed that they were highly associated, which might suggest that in fact they were measuring the same 123 construct (e.g., language abilities). The only task that did not seem to provide important information for language assessment was the Parent Report of Family History of Speech and Language Problems (Restrepo, 1998). This task was rather long to complete. Further adaptations to this task should be made to adjust the length and complexity of the required responses. Researchers and clinicians interested in using this battery might consider the possibility of not including the Family History of Speech and Language Problems Questionnaire. This language battery could be used with most Spanish dialects. The grammatical structures evaluated in this study are present and stable in all Spanish dialects with very few exceptions. One of the exceptions is for the Andean Spanish and Basque Spanish, both contact languages, where the omission of the clitic pronouns is acceptable (Stewart, 1999). Another variation related to direct object pronouns is Leismo, which is characteristic of Iberian Spanish. Leismo is the use of the object pronoun /le/ instead of the pronoun /lo/. No dialectal variation has been reported for articles, indirect object pronouns, reflexive, or adjectives. In general, it is possible to conclude that this investigation covers the generality of the grammatical structures and could be applied to the majority of Spanish dialects. The use of the direct object pronoun section of the elicitation task might be restricted for Andean and Basque variations of Spanish, and could be modified for the Iberian Spanish. As a general approach it seems better to target the generalities of the language, rather than targeting the specificities of one dialect in order to cover a greater population. For example, it might better to have a test that could be applicable to the majority of dialects, and where adaptations can be made, than to have a test that would only be applicable to a specific dialect. 124 Question 3 addressed how an SLP might use the data provided in this investigation for the language assessment of Spanish-speaking children. Normative standards are required for the adequate identification of language deficits. Clinicians might use the normative standards that emerged from this study by comparing the language skills of a particular child to the language skills of other children within a similar chronological age. Speech-language pathologists might use the means and standard deviations obtained from the various grammatical structures and language measures to identify whether a child is presenting with a ‘language deficit’. For example, consider the case of a 4-year-old SS child who has a MLTU of 4.0 on a narrative produced using the same story retelling task as in this study. Using the results of this investigation, it is possible to conclude that this child is performing 1.5 standard deviations below the mean of the 4-year-old group. This finding places the child on the low end of the distribution and suggests that he/she could be identified as a low performer in this task. Similarly, the data from this investigation could be use to conclude that a 3-year-old child who omitted 20% of direct objects on the elicitation task is performing at the same level as most of the children in her/his age group. Although the data from this investigation are limited in that they only included 116 Spanish-speaking children, they represent an important step in the characterization of normal development and, perhaps, disordered language in Spanish-speaking populations and provide important new information regarding these abilities for the age groups studied. Mean length of T-units and grammatical errors per T-units have been suggested by some researchers to be the most reliable measures to identify SS children with language disorders (Gutierrez-Clellen, et al., 2000; Restrepo, 1998; Simon-Cereijido & Gutierrez-Clellen, 2007). 125 This study provides novel data to characterize these two measures at the ages of three, four, and five. This is the first known study to cover these three age groups. The use of the means and standard deviations obtained in this study may assist clinicians and researchers in the identification of potential language disorders in SS children. Question 4 concerns how the results of this investigation are related to the acquisition of language in other Romance languages. In preliminary chapters of this dissertation, it was argued that Italian, French and Spanish have commonalities regarding vulnerable domains of disordered language. Previous research has suggested that object pronouns seemed to be vulnerable to errors for Spanish and Italian, and articles seemed to be vulnerable for Italian and Spanish. The current investigation elaborated on these findings and found that these areas of vulnerability also exist for normally developing Spanish-speaking children, based on the population and age range sampled. These structures were not found to be completely acquired by the older children in this investigation, which might suggest that they are developmentally complex. This might imply that the equivalent structures may have not been fully acquired by normally developing 5-year-old children who are learning Italian and French as first language. It is logical to assume that these structures will also be challenging for children with SLI. This investigation did not specifically include children with language disorders, so definitive conclusions regarding disordered language are beyond the scope of this discussion. These suggestions are speculative, but might offer insights regarding normal and disordered language development in Italian and French. Cross linguistic research on the developmental patterns of these grammatical structures will expand our knowledge of the normal and disordered acquisition of Romance languages. 126 Question 5 concerns the task of constructing a language assessment battery in a language for which limited developmental information exists. This is a challenging task when limited research is available on the language of interest. Fortunately for Spanish, some information on the grammatical difficulties that children with SLI present with was available in the literature. Additional information from Italian and French supported the process of deciding which grammatical structures could be sensitive to changes in language development for children speaking Romance languages. Language typology, then, was a decisive factor for the design of this investigation. This is a methodological strength of the research. Because the language assessment battery was designed to be based on the characteristics of Spanish, in contrast to an adaptation or translation of an English-test, clear developmental patterns emerged in the findings. An adaptation of an existing measure developed for English, for example, might not have been able to detect such developmental differences as they would not have focused on linguistic structures specific to the normal acquisition of Spanish. A rigorous design process was followed to create the elicitation task developed for this study. The cultural and age appropriateness of the task was a priority during the design process. Special considerations were taken to choose the vocabulary for the task. Only words that were used in the MacArthur Inventario del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas (Jackson-Maldonado, et al., 2003) were selected for the elicitation task to ensure that advanced vocabulary was not a confounding issue when responding to the task. Once the questions to elicit the grammatical structures were designed, a graphic designer from Cali, Colombia, was contacted to illustrate the questions. Contacting a person from within Colombia, and more specifically Cali, guaranteed that the pictures were in line with the 127 cultural community where the test was going to be administered. Pilot testing with Colombian adults confirmed that the test was targeting the grammatical structures of interest and that the test was culturally appropriate. Additional pilot testing with a small group of SS children reconfirmed these findings. The process of developing the story-retelling task also followed a careful design. Once again, special considerations for age and cultural appropriateness of the task were taken. Although the wordless storybook ‘Frog Goes to Dinner’ is a North American book, it has been widely used in cross-linguistic research. The script was written by the author of this dissertation who is a native Spanish-speaker from Cali, Colombia, to maximize the possibility that the story was culturally appropriate. The script included all the grammatical structures of interest and a high level of complexity to model the language for the children, thus ensuring that the structures would be elicited if they were in the developmental stage of the child. Further methodological considerations were also given to the strenuous work of transcribing and coding both the language samples and the responses to the elicitation task. This task required an average of 6 hours per child, which resulted in approximately 800 hours for the total sample of children, excluding the time needed to calculate reliability. Methodologically, it was very important to create a clear coding protocol for both the spontaneous and elicited tasks that guaranteed the uniformity of the data. The meticulous process of transcribing and coding the samples made it possible to obtain high percentages of agreement and to reduce measurement error, resulting in data that showed developmental differences between the groups. 128 8.1 Limitations This investigation has some limitations related to the generalization of the results that are important to consider. First of all, although the sample is larger than in most language acquisition studies, an even larger sample size would be required in order to be consistent with a true normative study. The distribution would be more stable with the inclusion of more children in further normative investigations. Another limitation of this investigation is that it is not possible to produce a definitive statement regarding the language abilities of the children who were low performers on the various language tasks administered. This research was not conceived to identify language disorders in the sample population but rather to describe normal development. The line between these two concepts is very narrow and somewhat arbitrary. Once normal development is identified, it is possible to also identify what level of performance lies below the normal range. However, the methodology employed for this research did not include the development of such statements. Finally, the results of this study would not be applicable to children who are on the extremes of the social economic status in Colombia, because representative children from Level 1 and Level 6 were not included in the data collection. An additional limitation regarding the usefulness of the normative information for the language measures is the time required for transcription and analysis. Clinicians who may want to use information obtained from the developmental measures would have to spend approximately two to three hours on the transcription and analysis of the language sample per child. This activity is labor intensive, and this could be a decisive factor in the eventual clinical utility of the measures. 129 8.2 Further directions While it was beyond the scope of the current research to apply the obtained findings to the identification of low performing children with potential language disorders, such investigations should be carried out, beginning perhaps with an examination of the low performing children who participated in this study. The relationships among the scores on the various language measures obtained from those children who scored in the lowest range of the distribution should be examined in order to determine if any single measure or group of measures reliably identified and discriminated these low performers from the rest of the group. The potential of the language tasks developed for this study to identify children with language disorders should also be further explored using adequate research protocols and larger samples of children. The elicitation task and the developmental language measures could be used in Discriminant Analyses to explore their specificity and sensitivity of the tasks for the diagnosis of language disorders in Spanish-speaking children for the age range examined. Further normative information could be obtained through the inclusion of larger sample sizes and including older children in order to determine at what age children perform as adults in the production of the various grammatical structures of interest to this study. This type of information is in great demand for both clinical assessment and in research. This would clearly require intensive work, especially with respect to the reliable transcription and coding of language samples. 130 8.3 Contributions The results of this investigation further the research related to language development of monolingual and Spanish-speaking children. These data are unique in that they cover the preschool years from age three to five for monolingual children. Another unique characteristic is that this study included data from both spontaneous and elicited language, which provided a more complete context to describe the language acquisition of Spanish-speaking children. Although many gaps remain, this study has extended the knowledge base of Spanish-language acquisition and has filled in many gaps regarding language development for SS children. This study stands out from all previous research on Spanish acquisition in that in included a fairly large sample size compared to most of the research on the acquisition literature. This study was carefully designed to target the characteristics of Spanish morphosyntax rather than being based on adaptations of English language tasks. Cultural and linguistic considerations were always taken into account in order to create a unique language assessment battery that permitted the characterization of the morphosyntactic development of Spanish-speaking preschool children. The results of this investigation also advance the existing research related to Romance languages. In the same way that this research was informed by characteristics of disordered language in Italian and French, researchers interested in Romance languages could apply the data provided in this dissertation to design assessment protocols and to make cross linguistic analyses of normal versus disordered acquisition patterns. The developmental patterns found for clitic pronouns and articles, for instance, might be of specific interest to researchers conducting investigations on Italian and French because these grammatical structures were 131 found to be problematic for IS and FS children with SLI. Language typology not only predetermines vulnerable grammatical domains in SLI but also guides the best assessment practices for examining language acquisition. The purpose of this study was aligned with research that has been conducted in French (Thordardottir, 2005) that tries to close the gap between languages with large amounts of research, such as English, and languages where research in language acquisition is just emerging, such as French and Spanish. Further efforts will be needed to keep advancing this area, but the growing population of bilingual children will certainly help to establish the necessity of continuing the investigation of monolingual and bilingual development in minority language children. This investigation may benefit professionals, families and children in various ways. Professionals such as speech-language pathologists, teachers, and bilingual educators, among others, may be able to apply the findings from this study to their students and/or case loads to describe the language skills of their children. Families may have better access to professionals who are qualified and who have the necessary normative information to make accurate and fair diagnoses. Children with and without language disorders may then have access to better services that will enable them to advance in their language development and establish the solid language base required to be successful in the school age learning tasks that will come in their way. 132 References Anderson, R. (2004). First language loss in Spanish-speaking children: Patterns of loss and implications for clinical practice. In B. 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Journal of Speech & Hearing Research, 39, 1284-1294. Wagner, C. R., Nettelbladt, U., Sahlen, B., & Nilholm, C. (2002). Conversation versus narration in pre-school children with language impairment. International Journal of Communication Disorders, 35, 83-93. 140 Appendix 1. Parent questionnaire (Spanish version) Cuestionario para la familia Fecha: ___/___/___ Code:______Fecha de nacimiento del niño(a): ___/___/___ Edad del niño(a): __ Nombre del niño(a): ______Nombre del informante: ______Relación con el niño(a): ______Opinión de la familia el niño(a) tiene problemas del habla o del lenguaje 1. En comparación con otros niños de la misma edad piensa usted que su niño(a) tiene problemas expresándose o haciéndose entender (entendido)? sí no 2. En comparación con otros niños de la misma edad piensa usted que su niño(a) tiene problemas del habla? sí no 3. Piensan su familia o amigos que su niño(a) está atrazado/a en su lenguaje? sí no 4. Para su edad o en comparación con otros niños, tiene su niño(a) problemas diciendo frases correctas? sí no 5. Piensan su familia o amigos que su niño(a) es difícil de entender? sí no 6. Para su edad, dice su niño(a) frases muy cortas? sí no 7. Piensa usted que su niño(a) tiene problemas con la gramática? (errores en sus frases) sí no 8. Cuando su niño(a) habla de la misma persona tiene dificultad usando el pronombre correcto como él, ella, ellos? sí no 9. Cuando su niño(a) habla de algo que ha pasado, tiene su niño(a) problemas explicando cuándo las cosas ocurrieron, o usa palabras en distintos tiempos? Por ejemplo, hablando de ayer usa "habla" en vez de "habló" sí no 10. Dice su niño frases correctas casi todo el tiempo? sí no 11. Cuando su niño(a) habla, tiene problemas diferenciando si está hablando de un hombre o una mujer? sí no 12. En comparación con otros niños de su misma edad, usa su niño(a) muchas palabras muy generales poco descriptivas como esa cosa, esta cosa? sí no 13. Tiene su niño(a) problemas encontrando las palabras exactas para expresarse? sí no 14. Tiene su niño(a) problemas explicando o describiendo cosas? sí no 15. Es difícil para su niño decirle que ha hecho durante el día? sí no 141 16. Se siente su niño frustrado porque no puede hablar bien? sí no 17. Tienen ustedes o los hermanos del niño(a) que repetirle lo que le dicen con más frecuencia que a otros niños? sí no 18. Tiene usted que repetirle a su niño(a) instrucciones o preguntas más que a otros niños? sí no 19. Entiende su niño casi todo lo que la gente le dice? sí no 20. Piensa que su niño(a) tiene problemas aprendiendo palabras nuevas? sí no 21. En comparación con otros niños de su misma edad, es difícil para su niño(a) aprender ideas (conceptos) nuevas(os)? sí no 22. En comparación con otros niños de su misma edad, tiene su niño un vocabulario muy bajito o limitado? sí no 23. Piensa usted que su niño(a) tiene un problema de aprendizaje? sí no 24. Tiene su niño(a) dislexia? (dificultad con la lectura y escritura) sí no 25. Para su edad, tiene su niño(a) problemas poniendo atención por mucho tiempo? sí no 26. Es su niño(a) hiperactivo/a? sí no 27. Le da trabajo a su niño(a) atender a una actividad o juego? sí no 28. Para su edad, tiene su niño(a) problemas pronunciando palabras? sí no 29. Es la pronunciación de su niño fácil de entender? sí no Historia de problemas del habla y lenguaje en la familia Alguien en su familia ha tenido o tiene Hermanos Papá Mamá Par/pad Par/mad 30. desarrollo de lenguaje normal sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 31. problemas de atención o hiperactividad sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 32. dificultad en la escuela sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 33. dislexia o problemas aprendiendo a leer sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 34. problemas del habla o de pronunciación sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 35. problemas de lenguaje en sus frases, palabra sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 36. clases de educación especial sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 142 37. terapia del habla o lenguaje sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 38. un programa para niños con problemas de aprendizaje, del habla o lenguaje sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 39. después de los 3 años de edad, problemas omitiendo palabras o partes de palabras en sus frases sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 40. problemas diciendo frases correctas sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 41. problemas haciéndose entender sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 42. problemas expresando ideas con palabras sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 43. problemas siguiendo instrucciones sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 44. problemas entendiendo preguntas sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 45. problemas entendiendo lo que se le dice sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 46. problemas produciendo ciertos sonidos sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 47. problemas leyendo o aprendiendo a leer sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 48. tartamudea (después de los 4 años de edad) sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no 49. repitió uno o mas años en la escuela sí no sí no sí no sí no sí no Comments: 143 Appendix 2. Parent Questionnaire (English version) Today's date: ____Code :____Date of Birth __/__/__ Age of the child: Child’s name: ______Name of the informant ______Your relation to the child: ____ Family's opinion if the child has speech or language problems 1. In comparison with other children of the same age, do you think that your child has problems expressing him/herself or being understood? yes no 2. In comparison with children of the same age, do you think that your child has speech problems? yes no 3. Do you family or friends think that your child is delayed in language? yes no 4. For his age or in comparison with other children, does your child have difficulty producing correct phrases? yes no 5. Do your family or friends think that your child is difficult to understand? yes no 6. For his age, does your child produce very short phrases? yes no 7. Do you think that your child has problems with his/her grammar? yes no 8. When your child talks about the same person, does he/she have difficulty using he correct pronoun like he, she, they all the time in his/her conversation? yes no 9. When your child talks about something that happened, does he/she have difficulty explaining when this happened or uses words in different times? For example, talking about yesterday the child say "falls" instead of "fell" yes no 10. Does you child use correct phrases almost all the time? yes no 11. When your child talks, does he/she have difficulty differentiating whether he/she is talking about a man or a woman? yes no 12. In comparison with other children of the same age, does your child use many words that are too general and not descriptive such as this, that, thing yes no 13. Does your child have difficulty finding the exact words to express him/herself? yes no 14. Does your child have difficulty explaining or describing things? yes no 15. Is it difficult for your child to tell you what he/she did during the day? yes no 16. Is your child frustrated because he/she can not talk well? yes no 144 17. Do you or your child's siblings have to repeat what you say to him or her with more frequency than to other children? yes no 18. Do you have to repeat questions or directions to your child more than to other children? yes no 19. Does your child understand most of what he/she is told? yes no 20. Do you think that your child has difficulty learning new words? yes no 21. In comparison with children of the same age, is it difficult for your child to learn new ideas? yes no 22. In comparison with children of the same age, does your child have a very low or limited vocabulary? yes no 23. Do you think that your child has a learning problem? yes no 24. Does your child have dyslexia? yes no 25. For his age, does your child have difficulty paying attention for a long period? yes no 26. Is your child hyperactive? yes no 27. Does your child have difficulty attending to an activity or game? yes no 28. For his age, does your child have difficulty pronouncing words? yes no 29. Is your child's pronunciation easy to understand? yes no History of speech and language problems in the family Has or had any of the child's relative any of the following problems? bro/sist father mother par/fath par/moth 30. normal language development yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 31. problems of attention yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 32. difficulties in school or learning yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 33. dyslexia or a problem learning to read yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 34. speech or pronunciation problems yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 35. language problems, like in phrases, words, and grammar yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 36. special education classes yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 37. speech and language therapy yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 145 38. program for children with speech, language or learning problems yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 39. omits words or parts of words in his/her phrases after age 3 yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 40. problems producing correct sentences yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 41. problems making his/herself understood yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 42. problems expressing ideas with words yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 43. problems following directions yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 44. problems understanding questions yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 45. problems understanding what he/she is told yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 46. problems producing certain sounds yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 47. problems reading or learning to read yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 48. stuttering after 4 years of age yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 49. repeated one or more grades yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no Comment 146 Appendix 3. Story Retelling Task Script Pag. LA RANA SALE A CENAR 1 Había una vez un niño que tenía tres mascotas: el perro, la tortuga y la rana saltarina. Los cuatro pasaban mucho tiempo juntos y se divertían. Una noche el niño se preparaba para salir a comer con su familia. Las mascotas estaban muy tristes porque el niño no las podía llevar con el. 2 Cuando el niño se estaba despidiendo del perro y la tortuga, la rana saltarina dio un brinco y se escondió en la chaqueta. 3 El niño se fue sin darse cuenta que la rana estaba en su bolsillo. 4 - 5 La familia llego a un restaurante muy bonito y elegante donde todas las personas estaban vestidas para la ocasión. 6 - 7 Mientras el mesero les preguntaba que querían comer, la rana decidió dar un paseo. Miró a su alrededor y dió un gran brinco. 8 La rana cayó dentro del saxofón. Todos se preguntaban porque el saxofón sonaba tan feo “No se pero voy a revisarlo”, dijo el músico. 9 En ese momento suas la rana le cayó justo en la cara. El músico sorprendido y asustado se fue para atrás y cayo dentro del tambor y lo rompió. 10-11 Los músicos quedaron confundidos sin saber que paso. Solo vieron algo verde que volaba. La rana saltarina aprovecho la confusión y dio un gran salto cayendo en un plato de ensalada. 12-13 Resulta que la ensalada donde estaba la ranita iba para una señora muy elegante. Cuando empezó a comer Suaz! Se encontró ala ranita. 14-15 “auxilio auxilio hay una rana en mi plato”. Y la rana brinco de nuevo para escaparse cayendo en una copa de un señor gordo y de bigote. 17 Al tomar el agua el señor, la rana salto de la copa y mua beso al señor en la nariz. 18 “Con que aquí estas rana” dijo el mesero. “Todo este desorden es por tu culpa”. 20 La agarro de las patas para sacarla del restaurante. –21 “no puede ser, es mi rana, que hace aquí?” dijo el niño. 22 - “Señor, señor, no se la lleve por favor, 23 es mi amiga la rana” dijo el niño. 147 La familia lo miraba muy confundidos y enojados. “En este restaurante no nos gusta tener rana. Llévensela inmediatamente”. Dijo el mesero muy enfadado. 25- Al regresar a casa todos estaban enojados porque la rana daño la noche. 26 La ranita se sintió muy mal al darse cuenta que los había molestado con su travesura. 27 “tu y tu dichosa rana. –28 Llévatela ahora mismo para tu cuarto” Dijo el papa. El perro y la tortuga no entendían que pasaba. 29 Cuando llegaron al cuarto recordaron todas la travesuras de la rana: el saxofón, el tambor, la ensalada, la copa y el beso. Todo había sido muy chistoso. El niño y la rana se rieron sin parar. Y colorin coloradoo este cuanto se ha acabo. 148 Appendix 4. Language Sample Coding Scheme Table 1. Coding Scheme for T-units Name Code Definition and examples T-unit [TU] ! Any main clause, and all its subordinate clauses and modifiers ! An utterance that contains a conjugated verb and a main idea ! If an utterance is interrupted, abandoned, or has unintelligible speech, it is NOT a TU ! All clauses coordinated by and, but, so, and then are coded as separate (y, pero, entonces, despues) ! One word responses with one infinitive verb is not a TU " estaba aca[TU]. " le cayo la rana en la cara [TU]. " entonces la rana se divirtió[TU]. " la rana se despido porque se iba a ir con el niño[TU]. ! When reported speech is used, the first clause of the reported speech is included in the main clause " entonces el[EL] niño dijo "hay pero esta es mi rana"[TU]. ! If additional clauses are attached, one new TU is coded " entonces el[EL] niño dijo "hay pero esta es mi rana"[TU] “No se la lleve”[TU]. Number of clauses [1] ! Clauses are counted by the number of conjugated verbs in each TU [2] " y entonces +la[LAC] vio[TU][1]. [3] " entonces el[EL] niño dijo "hay pero esta es mi rana"[TU][2]. " y las mascotas de el estaban muy tristes porque no las podía llevar porque alla habían señores bravos[TU][3]. Direct Object [OD] Used when there is an object following a potential transitive verb " y entonces el niño miro la rana Table 2. Word Codes Name Code Examples Definite feminine [LA] " la[LA] señora estaba mareada singular article Definite masculine [EL] " y rompió el[el] tambor singular article [DEL] " se fueron en el carro del[DEL] señor [AL] " y le dio un beso al[AL] señor Definite feminine [LAS] " las[LAS] mascotas estaban tristes plural article Definite masculine [LOS] " estaba jugando con los[LOS] animales plural article Indefinite [UN] " había un[UN] niño que se preparaba para ir aun restaurante masculine singular article Indefinite feminine [UNA] " y entonces se encontró con una[UNA] señora singular article Indefinite [UNOS] " El niño vio unos[unos] animales masculine plural article Indefinite feminine [UNAS] " y después en el restaurante el niño miro unas[UNAS] cosas plural article 149 plural article Plural nouns [S] " habían dos ranas[S] [ES] " estaba jugando con los animales[ES] NOTE: the clitic at the end of the verb is separated from the verb and coded as a separate clitic Reflexive pronoun [RX] Used when a true reflexive is use Pseudo-reflexive [X] " El niño se baño Used when a there is an obligatory reflexive verbs that does not imply reflexivity " el niño se quedo solo Indirect clitic [LE] " le[LE] dio un beso en la nariz pronoun singular Indirect clitic [LES] " les dijo adiós a los animales pronoun plural Direct object [LAC] " estaba buscando la[LAC] pronoun femenine " la[LAC] queria traer singular Direct object [LO] " estaba besando lo[LO] pronoun masculine " lo[LO] beso singular Direct object [LASC] " las[LASC] queria traer pronoun femenine " estaba buscando las[LASC] plural Direct object [LOSC] " estaba empujando los[LOSC] pronoun masculine " los[LOSC] empujo plural Adjectives " y la mama estaba feliz[ADJ] " le dio un pico al señor gigante[ADJ] Table 3. Utterance Error Codes Name Code Examples Abandoned > Speaker stops in mid-utterance utterance " Yo tengo una> Interrupted ^ Speaker is interrupted before completing utterance utterance " Yo tengo una^ Mazes () False starts, repetitions and repairs. " El carro (tiene) tiene gasolina Unintelligible XX Transcriber cannot understand what speaker is saying. X for each word not utterance understood. " El carro X gasolina " El carro XX XXX for a complete sentence not understood Character voice ‘’ ‘’ ! Is when the speaker takes on the character and voice of the person in the story. " y el niño le dijo “esa es mi rana’’ " y la señora grito “hay una rana en mi plato” Table 4. Word Error Codes Name Code Examples Grammatical error [GE] Used when no other codes work to define grammatical errors. " la tortuga y la rana se fueron salil [GE] Error Word Added [EW:add] Used when the utterance has an extra word added to it. " y rompio de[EW-ADD] el tambor 150 " ellos pasearon en[EW-ADD] esa noche. Object ommision [OO] Used when there is a potential transitive verb without an object " y cogio. " La rana empujo Articles Article omission [A-:] " daño [A-:el] plato " [A-:la] rana salto " donde esta [A-:la] rana Article gender [A/G:] " y luego el señor cogio a la rana de los[A/G:las] patas substitution " esta la[A/;EL] niño con la rana en el bolsillo Article number [A/#:] " la[A/#:las] niñas estaban tristes substitution " las[A/#:la] niña estaba triste Article Type [A/T:] ! Used when the type of article {definite/indefinite) required is substituted substitution " Había una vez el[A/T:un] niño " Habia la[A/T;una] flor " Se entro una[A/T:la] rana por ahí (rana was previously mentioned) Adjectives Adjective gender [Adj/G:] " la rana estaba enojado[Adj/G:enojada] substitution Adjective number [Adj/#:] " los niños estaban enojado[Adj/#:enojados] substitution Pronouns Clitic pronoun [C-/:] " no te [C-/:la] lleves omission Clitic pronoun [C/G:] " no te lo[C/G:la] lleves (Child was consistently using the noun ”rana” gender substitution before). Clitic pronoun [C/#:] " y las[C/#:LA] cogio de los pies (reference to the “rana”) number substitution Reflexive pronoun [X-:se] " [X-:se] metio en la trompeta omission Added reflexive [X-add] " y luego se[X-add] salto Prepositions Preposition [P-:] " la rana ahí [P-:en] la mesa ommission Preposition [P/:] " y le dijeron que mande a la ranita en[P/:a] el cuarto substitution Verbs Verb omission [V-:] " la rana [V-:estaba] escondida en el bolso Verb number [V/#:] " los niños y la rana ya se va[V/#:van] con el substitution Tense substitution [V/T:] " y le dijo que estan[V/T:estaban] bravos error Verb over- [V/O:] " y le[LE] pono[V/O:puso] una[UNA] ropa generalization Verb agreement [VAM] " que estaba feliz la mama y el papa [VAM]. noun movement 151 Appendix 5. Elicitation Task Clitic object pronouns practice items Clitic pronoun El día esta muy soleado y el niño quiere mirar hacia afuera. Qué hace el Feminine/singular niño con la ventana? The day is sunny and the boy wants to look outside. What does the boy do to the window? La abre He opens it Clitic pronoun Mira! Esta mama tiene un bebé. Qué le hace la mama al bebé? Masculine/singular Look! This mom has a baby. What does the mom do to the baby? Lo mira – Lo abrazo – Lo alza She looks at him - She hugs him - She holds him Clitic pronoun Los perros estaban muy sucios. Qué le hacen los niños a los perros? Masculine/plural The dogs were very dirty. What do the boys do to the dogs? Los bañan They wash them Clitic object pronouns testing items Clitic pronoun La niña y la mama iban a salir de paseo. La niña se bañó y la mama la Feminine/singular ayudo a arreglarse. Qué le hace la mama a la niña? Animacy The girl and the mom were going out. The girl took a shower and the mom helped her to get ready to go. What does the mom do to the girl? La peina She combs her 152 Clitic pronoun Hoy es el cumpleaños de esta niña. Su mama le hizo una rica torta y le Feminine/singular puso una vela. Qué le esta haciendo la niña a la vela? Today is this girl’s birthday. Her mom made her a yummy cake and put a candle on it. What is the girl doing to the candle? La sopla She blows it Clitic pronoun La niña tenia mucha hambre y la mama le dio una galleta. Qué hace la Feminine/singular niña con la galleta? Double clitic The girl was very hungry and the mom gave her a cookie. What does the girl do with the cookie? Se la come She eats it Clitic pronoun Este niño tenia mucha hambre y le pido a la mamá una manzana. Qué Femeninee/singular hace la mamá con la manzana? Double clitic This boy was very hungry and asked his mom for an apple. What does the mom do with the apple? Se la da She gives it to him Clitic pronoun La abuelita le regalo un libro muy lindo al niño. Qué hace el niño con el Marculine/singular libro? Animacy The grandmother gave a nice book to the boy. What does the boy do with the book? Lo lee He read it 153 Clitic pronoun Hoy este niño recibió un regalo de parte de su papa. Qué le hace el niño al Marculine/singular regalo? Today this boy got a gift from his dad. What does the boy do to the gift? Lo abre He opens it Clitic pronoun Este niño tenía mucha sed y la mamá le dio un vaso de jugo. Qué hace el Marculine/singular niño con el jugo? Double clitic This boy was very thirsty and the mom gave him a glass of juice. What does the boy do with the juice? Se lo toma He drinks it Clitic pronoun Este niño se acaba de comer un mango y quedo muy sucio. Le pide a su Masculine/singular mama el jabón. Que hace la mama con el jabón? Double clitic The boys just had a mango and now he is very dirty. He asks his mom for the soap. What does the mom do with the soap? Se Lo da She gives it to him Clitic pronoun Esta niña tiene unas ranas. La niña va a salir al patio y quiere llevarse las Feminine/plural ranas en la caja. Qué le hace la niña a las ranas? Animacy This girl has frogs. The girl is going to the backyard and wants to take the frogs with her. What does the girl do with the frogs? Las mete en la caja She puts them on the box 154 Clitic pronoun Que hace la mama a las flores? Feminine/plural What does this mom do to the flowers? Las corta She cuts them Clitic pronoun La niña debe terminar de arreglarse pronto porque va saliendo para el Feminine/plural colegio. Que hace la niña con las medias? Double clitic The girl needs to get ready soon because she is going to school. What does the girl do with the socks? Se las pone She puts them on Clitic pronoun La mama quiere mucho a sus bebes y piensa que son muy lindos. Qué le Masculine/plural hace la mama a los bebes? Animacy The mom loves a lot her babies and she thinks they are very cute. What does the mom do to the babies? Los mira She looks at them Clitic pronoun La familia termino de comer y la mama recogió los platos. Qué le hace la Masculine/plural mama a los platos? The family finished dinner and the mom picked up the plates. What does the mom do to the dishes? Los lava She washes them 155 Clitic pronoun El niño va a salir pronto pero aun no tiene zapatos. Qué hace el niño con Masculine/plural los zapatos? Double clitic The boy is going to leave soon but he does not have his shoes on yet. What does the boy do with the shoes? Se los pone He puts them on Clitic pronoun Hoy es el día de la madre y a la mama de esta niña le encantan las cartas. Dative/objeto indirecto- Qué hace la niña? Today is mother’s day and the mom of this girl loves setter. What does this girl do? Le escribe una carta She writes her a letter Clitic pronoun La niña llego del colegio y le dijo a la mama que tenia mucha hambre. Dative/objeto indirecto- Qué hace la mama? The girl got home from school and told the mother that she was very hungry. What does the mom do? Le hace comida She cooks something for her Clitic pronoun Qué le hace la profesora al niño? Dative/objeto indirecto- What does the teacher do to the boy? Le pinta la cara She paints the face 156 Noun phrase agreement practice items Este señor estaba vendiendo estos peces y estas mariposas que están aquí. Unos niños llegaron y cada niño compro uno de estos Qué compró este niño? This person was selling these butterflies and these fishes . These kids came here and each kid bought one of these.. Which one did this boy buy? Noun phrase agreement La mariposa amarilla Feminine/singular The yellow butterfly Noun phrase agreement El pescado Amarillo Masculine/singular The yellow fish Noun phrase agreement La mariposa azul Feminine/singular The blue butterfly Noun phrase agreement testing items La mamá les trajo estas manzanas y estas uvas al papá, al abuelo y a los dos niños. Cada uno escogió una de estas. Cual escogió el papá? Mom brought these fruits to the father, the grandfather and the kids. Each one of them chose one fruit. Which one did the father choose? Noun phrase agreement La manzana verde Feminine/singular The green apple Noun phrase agreement La manzana roja Feminine/singular The red apple Noun phrase agreement Las uvas verdes Feminine/plural The green grapes Noun phrase agreement Las uvas rojas Feminine/plural The red grapes 157 La familia tenía sed y la mamá les trajo estos vasos y estas botellas de agua al papá, al abuelo y a los dos niños. Cada unos escogió uno de estos. Que escogió el papa? The family was thirsty and the mom brought these glasses and bottles of water to the father, the grandfather and the kids. Each one of them chose one of these. What did the father choose? Noun phrase agreement El vaso pequeño Masculine/singular The small glass Noun phrase agreement El vaso grande Masculine/singular The big glass Noun phrase agreement La botella grande Feminine/singular The big bottle Este señor estaba vendiendo estos lápices y estas velas que están aquí. Uno niños llegaron y cada niño compro una de estas cosas. Qué compro este niño? This person was selling these pencils and these candles. Each boy bought one of these. What did this boy buy? Noun phrase agreement Los lapices grandes Masculine/plural The big pencils Noun phrase agreement Los lápices péquenos Masculine/plural The small pencils Noun phrase agreement Las velas grandes Femenine/plural The big candles 158 Estos animales iban volando hacia el niño. Mira, estos se le pararon al niño. Cuales se le pararon al niño? These birds were flying towards the boy. Look, these ----on the kid. What _____on the kid? Noun phrase agreement Los pajaros rojos masculine/plural The red birds Indefinite articles practice and testing items Indefinite article Un peine Practice A comb Indefinite article Una taza Practice A cup Indefinite article Unos libros Practice books Indefinite article Una cama Feminine/singular A bed Indefinite article Una escoba Feminine/singular A broom Indefinite article Una llave Feminine/singular A key Indefinite article Un carro Masculine/singular A car Indefinite article Un lápiz Masculine/singular A pencil Indefinite article Un perro Masculine/singular A dog 159 Indefinite article Unas botas Feminine/plural boots Indefinite article Unas flores Feminine/plural flowers Indefinite article Unas tijeras Feminine/plural scissors Indefinite article Unos trenes Masculine/plural trains Indefinite article Unos relojes Masculine/plural watches Indefinite article Unos colores Masculine/plural colors 160 Appendix 6. Consent Forms and Assent Script LETTER OF CONSENT-ADULT My name is Anny Castilla, a Doctoral student in the Department of Speech Language Pathology at The University of Toronto. I am conducting a research study on how and when children learn to speak Spanish. I invite your participation in this study, which will involve answering some questions while looking at pictures. Your participation will last for 5 minutes approximately. Your will be audio recorded during the activity but not identifying information will be recorded on the tape.Your participation in this study is completely voluntary. The results of the research study may be published, but your name will not be used. Although the data from this research will remain indefinitely in a database, your name will be kept confidential. Although there is not direct benefit for participating in this study, you will receive 5.000 Colombian pesos as a compensation for your time. If you have any questions concerning the research study, please call me at XXXXX. I will be happy to discuss any concerns with you. Sincerely, CONSENTIMIENTO Mi nombre es Anny castilla y soy una estudiante de doctorado en fonoaudiología en la Universidad de Toronto, Ontario, Canadá. Estoy haciendo una investigación para aprender como y cuando los niños aprenden a hablar Español.Me gustaría que usted participara en este estudio lo que involucraría responder a algunas preguntas mientras mira unos dibujos. Esto le tomara aproximadamente 5 minutos. Usted podrá ser grabado en audio pero no se guardara información que lo identifique. Su participación es absolutamente voluntaria. Los resultados de esta investigación pueden ser publicados, pero su nombre no será revelado. Aunque los datos de esta investigación quedaran permanentemente registrados en una base de datos, el nombre de su hijo será confidencialmente mantenido. Aunque no hay beneficio directo para usted por participar en este estudio, usted recibirá 5.000 pesos Colombianos para compensarlo por su tiempo. Si usted tiene alguna pregunta relacionada con esta investigación comuníquese conmigo al teléfono XXXXXX. Estaré dispuesta a ayudarle en lo que pueda. Atentamente, 161 PARENTAL LETTER OF CONSENT Dear Parent: My name is Anny Castilla, a doctoral student in the Department of Speech Language Pathology at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada. I am conducting a research study on how and when children between the ages of 3 and 5 years learn to use certain types of grammar in Spanish. This study has been approved by the research ethics board of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine. I would like to invite your child to participate in this study. Participation will involve a variety of tasks. First, your child will participate in a hearing screening. If your child passes the hearing screening, he/she will participate in three language tasks. These tasks include a vocabulary test where your child will be asked to point to some pictures, a story retelling where the child will be told a story and asked to tell it back to me, and a task based on answering questions based on pictures. Your child will be audio recorded during a story retelling task. The study will be conducted in one or two sessions of 60 minutes approximately, depending on each child’s individual needs. The children will be given a break during the session if they desire. If your child does not pass the hearing screening, he/she will be referred for a complete hearing evaluation and will not be eligible to participate in the study. As part of this study, I would also require your participation in filling out a questionnaire with information about your child’s development and family history of speech and language problems. This task should take approximately 20 minutes of your time. Your and your child's participation in this study is completely voluntary. If you choose not to participate or have your child participate or if you wish to withdraw your child from the study at any time, there will be no consequences for you or your child in any way. Your child will be asked for assent before any of the assessment tasks take place. The results of the research study may be published, but your child's name will not be used. No identifying information will be associated with any of the results obtained from you or your child. Although the data from this research will remain indefinitely in a database, your child’s name will be kept confidential. You may request a copy of the results once the study is completed. The possible benefit of your child's participation in this research is to have their hearing screened and to have an assessment of their vocabulary and understanding of certain grammar structures in Spanish. Should your child perform below expectations in the language tasks you will be informed immediately and she/he will be referred for a full speech and language assessment Your child will receive stickers during the tasks and an ice cream coupon at the end of the sessions to compensate her/him for his/her time and help. If you have any questions concerning the research study or your child's participation in this study, please contact me at the address below. l will be happy to discuss any questions you might have. Should you have any questions about the ethical procedures associated with this study, please contact the University of Toronto Ethics Review Board, whose contact information appears below. Thanks you for considering participation in this study. 162 Padres de familia: Mi nombre es Anny castilla y soy una estudiante de doctorado en fonoaudiología en la Universidad de Toronto, Ontario, Canadá. Estoy haciendo una investigación para aprender cuando los niños entre 3 y 5 años usan cierto tipo de estructuras gramaticales en español. Este estudio ha sido aprobado por el Comité de Ética de la Facultad de medicina de La Universidad de Toronto. Me gustaría invitar a su hijo(a) a que participe en este estudio lo que involucraría participar en varias actividades. Primero, su hijo(a) participaría en una prueba de audición. Si su hijo(a) pasa la prueba de audición, el/ella pasaría a participar en tres actividades del lenguaje: una prueba de vocabulario en la cual se le pedirá a los niños que señalen unos dibujos, una prueba en la que los niños escucharan un cuento y luego me lo contaran de nuevo a mi, y una actividad en la cual los niños responderán unas preguntas basados en unos dibujos. Su hijo(a) será grabado en audio mientras recuenta la historia. La participación de su hijo(a) tendrá una duración de una o dos sesiones de aproximadamente 60 minutos dependiendo de las necesidades especificas de su hijo (a). Los niños tendrán un descanso durante cada sesión si ellos lo requieren. Si su hijo(a) no pasa la prueba de audición el/ella será remitido para una prueba completa de audición y no será elegible para participar en el estudio. Como parte de este estudio, se requiere también de su participación llenando un cuestionario con información sobre el desarrollo de su hijo e historia de problemas de habla y lenguaje en su familia. Esta actividad le tomara aproximadamente 20 minutos. La participación suya y de su hijo es absolutamente voluntaria. Si usted decide no participar o que su hijo(a) no participe o retirarse del estudio en cualquier momento, no habrá penalidad de ningún tipo (por ejemplo, las calificaciones de su hijo(a) no se verán afectadas). Se le preguntara a su hijo si quiere participar en las actividades antes de que cualquiera de las actividades sea llevada a cabo. Los resultados de esta investigación pueden ser publicados, pero el nombre de su hijo(a) no será revelado. Ninguna información que los identifique será asociada con los resultados obtenidos. Aunque los datos de esta investigación quedaran permanentemente registrados en una base de datos, el nombre de su hijo será confidencialmente mantenido. Los posibles beneficios para su hijo(a) por participar en esta investigación es que el/ella tendrá su evaluación de la audición, vocabulario y algunas estructuras gramaticales. Si los resultados de su hijo(a) están bajo las expectativas de las actividades, usted será informado y su hijo(a) será remitido para evaluación completa del lenguaje. Su hijo(a) recibirá calcomanías durante la participación en las actividades y un cupón para un helado al final de la(s) sesión(es) para compensarlo(la) por su tiempo y colaboración. Si usted tiene alguna pregunta relacionada con esta investigación o con la participación de su hijo en este estudio comuníquese conmigo al teléfono 6661441. Estaré dispuesta a ayudarle en lo que pueda. Atentamente, 163 CHILD VERBAL ASSENT The examiner will ask to the child: Here I have some books and pictures. I need your help to answer some questions and tell me a story. Do you want to help me? Did the child assent to the task YES____ NO ___ (A positive answer will be considered as an assent to participate in the task) ASENTIMIENTO VERBAL DEL NIÑO(A) El evaluador le preguntara al niño(a): Aquí tengo unos libros y unos dibujos. Necesito tu ayuda en responder algunas preguntas y contarme una historia. Quieres ayudarme? El niño asintió? SI____ NO____ (Una respuesta afirmativa será considerada como asentimiento de parte del niño) 164 Appendix 7. Direct Object Clitics Table 1. Coding Schema Code Description and examples Clitic omission The child produced a verb but omitted the target clitic Prompt: Que hace el niño con el jugo? Response: Tomar. ‘Drink Ø.’ Tomandose. ‘Drink Ø’ Tomando. “Drinking Ø’ Target clitic The child produced the target clitic Prompt: Que hace las niña con las flores? ‘What does the girl do with the flowers?’ Response: Las corta. ‘She cuts them.’ Cortarlas ‘She cuts them.’ Esta cortandolas ‘She is cutting them.’ Number The child changed the target number of the clitic substitution Prompt: Que hace el niño con las medias? ‘What does the child do with the socks?’ Response: Esta poniendosela. ‘He is putting it.’ Se la esta poniendo. ‘He is putting it.’ Gender The child changed the target gender of the clitic. substitution Prompt: Que hace la niña con la galleta? ‘What is the girl doing with the cookie?’ Response: Comiendoselo. ‘Eating it.’ Prompt: Que hace el niño con el regalo? ‘What is the boy doing with the present?’ Response: Abriendola. ‘Opening it.’ Se substitution the child substituted the target clitic for a reflexive clitic Prompt: Que le hace la mama a la niña? Response: Peinarse. ‘ Brushing herself.’ Arreglandose ‘ Brushing herself.’ Peinandose ‘‘ Brushing herself.’ Case The child substituted the target clitic for a indirect object clitic (le- substitution les) Prompt: Que hace el niño con el regalo? ‘What is the boy doing with the present?’ Response: Le esta poniendo una cinta. ‘She is putting her a ribbon.’ Prompt: Que le hace la mama a la niña? Response: Le peino el cabello. ‘She is brushing her hair.’ 165 The child produced a semantically correct response but Grammatical grammatically incorrect anomaly Prompt: Que hace la niña con las ranas? ‘What is the girl doing with the frogs?’ Response: Yo no salen. ‘They don’t come out.’ Lexical The child produced a grammatical correct response but semantically substitution different from the target response Response: Para ir al colegio. ‘To go to school.’ Una torta para la niña. ‘A cake for the girl’ Papa dijo. “Dad said” Lexical NP The child produces a noun phrase instead of a clitic Prompt: Que hace el niño con el jugo? “What is the child doing with the juice?’ Response: Esta tomando un jugo. ‘He is drinking a juice.’ Prompt: Que hace la niña con la galleta? ‘What is the girl doing with the cookie?’ Response: Esta comiendo galleta. ‘She is eating cookie’ Unintelligible The child produced a partial or complete unintelligible response. Non-response The child did not answer to the question. Table 2. Responses to direct clitic object - elicitation task Response 3 years 4 years 5 years Adults Target clitic 32.2% (26.0) 65.0% (24.8) 69.6% (23.3) 97.9% Omission 22.2% (18.6) 13.7% (19.2) 13.0% (12.9) 2.1% Gender substitution 3.6% (8.0) 3.4% (7.6) 2.9% (7.6) 0% Number substitution 8.9% (13.6) 8.1% (10) 5.5% (9.3) 0% Case substitution 2.2% (5.5) 1.5% (5.5) 1.6% (5.0) 0% Se substitution 1.8% (4.1) 2.0% (3.8) 0.4% (2.0) 0% Grammatical error 2.1% (3.8) 0.3% (1.9) 0.3% (2.0) 0% No response 3.7% (19.5) 0.0% (0) 0.0% (0) 0% Others 14.7% 3.5% 2.8% 0% Unintelligible 8.5% (20.4) 0.7% (2.6) 1% (3.0) 0% Lexical noun phrase 3.5% (5.7) 1.8% (4.6) 2.6% (6.1) 0% 166 Appendix 8. Reflexives Table 1. Coding Schema Code Description and examples Reflexive The child produced a reflexive pronoun. Prompt: Qué hace la niña con la galleta? ‘What is the girl doing with the cookie?’ Response: Comersela ‘She is eating it.’ Se la come ‘She is eating it.’ Esta comiendosela ‘She is eating it.’ Omission The child omitted the reflexive pronoun. Prompt: Qué hace el niño con el jugo? ‘What is the boy doing with the juice?’ Response: *Tomando ‘Drinking.’ *Tomarlo ‘Drinking it’ *Lo toma ‘Drinking it’ Unintelligible The response of the child was unintelligible. No response The child did not respond to the question. Not The child responded to the question but with an unrelated statement. applicable Prompt: Qué hace el niño con el jugo? ‘What is the boy doing with the juice?’ Response: A porque este jugo mamá ‘eh because this juice mom.’ Con la mamá ‘with the mom.’ Table 2. Responses to reflexive pronouns - Elicitation task 3 years 4 years 5 years Adults Reflexive 37.3% (16.8) 69.2%(31.7) 75.7% (31.3) 93.3% (8.6) Omission 46.8% (28.2) 29.0% (29.5) 22.3% (28.8.0) 6.7 (8.6) Unintelligible 9.0% (19.0) 0.3% (5.8) 1.0% (3.8) 0% (0) No response 3.7% (8.0) 1.3% (1.8) 1.0% (5.7) 0 (0) Not applicable 2.6% (11.5) 0% (0) 0% (0) 0 (0) 167 Appendix 9. Adjectives Table 1. Coding Schema Code Description and examples Adjective The child produced an adjective Prompt: Cuál escogió el papa? ‘Which one did the father choose?’ Response: Una botella azul ‘A blue bottle.” La botella chiquita “The blue bottle.” La pequeña “The small one.” Omission The child omitted the adjective Prompt: Cuál escogió el niño? ‘Which one did the boy choose?’ Response: La manzana ‘the apple.’ Una manzana ‘an apple’ Manzana ‘apple’ Gender error The child produced an adjective that did not agree on gender with the noun it was modifying Prompt: Cuál escogió el X? ‘Which one did the X choose?’ Response: *Manzana rojo ‘Red apple.” *Un pecao amailla ‘A yellow fish.’ *Un pez amarilla ‘A yellow fish.’ Number error The child produced an adjective that did not agree on number with the noun it was modifying Prompt: Cuál escogió el X? ‘Which one did the X choose?’ Response: *Unas manzanas verde ‘Some green apples.’ *Uvas verde ’Green apples.’ *Un lapicero grandotas ‘A big pen.’ Not applicable The child produced an unintelligible answer, did not respond to the question, or produced an unrelated statement Table 2. Responses to adjectives – Elicitation task Response 3 4 5 Adults Adjective 33.3% (29.5) 69.2%(26.1) 79.33% (25.0) 98.6% Omission 38.3% (29.2) 13.0% (18.0) 5.4% (11.91) 1.4% Gender error 0.9% (2.6) 2.3% (4.3) 2.1% (3.8) 0% Number error 0.9% (3.3) 3.4% (5.6) 2.9% (5.0) 0% Not applicable 28.6% (32.4) 11.3% (12.6) 10.1% (13.8) 0% 168 Appendix 10. Indefinite Articles Table 1. Coding Scheme Code Description and examples Target The child produced the target indefinite article indefinite article Prompt: Qué es esto? ’What is this?’ Response: Un carro ‘A car’ Unas flores ‘Some flowers.’ Unos relojes ‘Some clocks.’ Other correct The child produced a non-target correct indefinite article indefinite article Prompt: Qué es esto? ’What is this?’ Response: Unos zapatos ‘some shoes’ Un par de botas ‘A couple of boots’ Un chuchu ‘A train’ Omission The child omitted the article Prompt: Qué es esto? ’What is this?’ Response: Botas ‘Boots.’ Perro ‘Dog.’ Flores ‘Flowers.’ Gender The child produced an article that did not agree on gender with the noun. substitution Prompt: Qué es esto? ’What is this?’ Response: *Uno tren ‘A train’. *Uno flor ‘A flower.’ Number The child produced an article that did not agree on number with the noun. substitution Prompt: Qué es esto? ’What is this?’ Response: *Las bota ‘The boot.’ *Una meias ‘A socks.’ Definite article The child produced a correct definite article. Prompt: Qué es esto? ’What is this?’ Response: La mesa ‘The table’. El perro ‘The dog’ El Carro ‘The Car’ No response/ The child did not respond or the response was unintelligible Unintelligible 169 Table 2. Responses to indefinite article - Elicitation task 3 years 4 years 5 years Adults Target indefinite 36.3% (21.4) 50.2%(21.4) 45.0% (24.0) 80% article Other correct 9.0% (11.3) 2.2% (3.7) 1.9% (4.1) 0% indefinite article Omission 31.3% (22.7) 40.6% (25.0) 46.9% (27.4) 19.0% Gender 1.% (2.9) 0.6% (2.2) 0% (0) 0% substitution Number 3.4% (6.9) 1.5% (4.6) 1.7% (4.9) 0% substitution Definite Article 3.8% (6.4) 3.0% (5.2) 3.1% (7.9) 0.7% No response/ 14.2% (18.8) 1.9% (3.0) 1.7% (2.2) 0% unintelligible 170 Appendix 11. Definite Articles Table 1. Coding Schema Code Description and examples Target definite The child produced the target definite article article Prompt: Cuál escogió el niño? ‘Which one did the boy choose?’ Response: La manzana ‘The apple’ La manzana roja ‘The red apple.’ La roja. ‘The red one’ Omission The child omitted the article Prompt: : Cuál escogió el niño? ‘Which one did the boy choose?’ Response: Uvas ‘Grapes.’ Uvas rojas ‘Red grapes.’ Gender The child produced an article that did not agree on gender with the noun. substitution Prompt: Qué es esto? ’What is this?’ Response: *Uno tren ‘A train’. *Uno flor ‘A flower.’ Number The child produced an article that did not agree on number with the noun. substitution Prompt: Qué es esto? ’What is this?’ Response: *Las bota ‘The boot.’ *Una meias ‘A socks.’ Indefinite The child produced a correct indefinite article. article Prompt: : Cuál escogió el niño? ‘Which one did the boy choose?’ Response: Una roja ‘A red one’. Una manzana ‘An apple’ Una manzana roja ‘A red apple’ Other correct The child produced a quantifier determiner Prompt: : Cuál escogió el niño? ‘Which one did the boy choose?’ Response: Tres lapices. ‘Three pencils’ Tres velas. ‘Three candles’ Dos pajaros. ‘Two birds’ No response/ The child did not respond or the response was unintelligible Unintelligible Other response The child produced an unrelated response 171 Table 2. Responses to definite article - Elicitation task 3 4 5 Adults Target definite art 14.9% (17.5) 24.3%(25.0) 26.4% (26.7) 93.3%(10.2) Indefinite Article 26.8% (22.0) 41.7% (26.8) 45.7% (33.0) 2.3% Omission 21.8% (22.8) 19.7% (18.7) 16.0% (22.0) 2.3% Gender 0.4% (1.9) 0.4% (1.8) 0.5% (1.9) 0% substitution Number 1.8% (4.9) 1.3% (3.6) 1.7% (4.9) 0% substitution No response 19.1% (36.8) 1.0% (0.4) 2.41% (5.6) 0% Other response 7.9% (10.0) 3.6% (6.0) 1.0% (2.7) 0% Other correct 9.17% (10.3) 6.83% (8.1) 6.92% (7.9) 2.3% determiner Table 3. Correlation table Adjective Definite article Indefinite article Adjective 1 .356** .323** Definite article .356** 1 -.460** Indefinite article .323** -.460** 1 172 Appendix 12. Correlation Table Controlling for Age NU-TU MLTU SUB-I GRE- PRSLP FHSLP TVIP- TVIP- ET- TU raw Stand. Score NU-TU 1.00 MLTU .376 1.00 ** SUB-I .194 .610 1.00 ** GRE-TU .041 .029 -.076 1.00 PRSLP -.257 -.438 -.324 .043 1.00 * ** * FHSLP -.145 -.047 .040 .121 .140 1.00 TVIP- .210 .157 .191 -.177 -.304 -.362 1.00 Raw * ** TVIP- .199 .149 .192 -.162 -.314 -.338 .964 1.00 Stand. * ** ** ET- .423 .385 .278 -.249 -.528 -.150 .513 .523 1.00 Score ** ** * * ** ** ** * Significant at the .05 level ** Significant at the .001 level