"Exploring the Use of Parent and Teacher Questionnaires to Screen for Language Disorders in Bilingual Children"

Postdoctoral Scholar Amy Pratt (right) is first author of an article in Topics in Early Childhood Special Education exploring the accuracy of a parent and teacher report designed to measure developmental language disorder in bilingual children. The title of the article is “Exploring the Use of Parent and Teacher Questionnaires to Screen for Language Disorders in Bilingual Children.”

Co-authors are Postdoctoral Scholar Ashley M. Adams, Professor Elizabeth D. Peña, and Lisa Before (Temple University).

Pratt’s research investigates the typical and atypical language development of children who speak Spanish. She is particularly interested in how young children’s language ability serves as a foundation for later literacy development, and how children’s language and literacy growth can be supported via evidence-based, culturally appropriate intervention. She serves as a visiting specialist on the Language Evaluation and Development in Education Research (LEADER) project in Peña’s Human Abilities in Bilingual Language (HABLA) Lab. 

Adams is a licensed bilingual speech-language pathologist who has worked primarily with Spanish-English bilingual populations and special education preschool. Her research focuses on developing and implementing literacy interventions for Spanish-English dual language learners at the individual, small group, and classroom level. She is working in the Individualizing Student Instruction (iSi) laboratory, and is project manager for the Early Learning Research Network (ELRN) assessment team

Peña is a certified Speech-Language Pathologist and a Fellow of the American Speech Language Hearing Association. In the UCI School of Education, she serves as Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Diversity, and directs the HABLA Lab. Peña's research interests include bilingualism, language impairment, and test development and treatment.

Abstract
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We explore the classification accuracy of a parent and teacher report measure, the Inventory to Assess Language Knowledge (ITALK), to screen for developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children. Participants included 120 Spanish English bilingual children with typical development (TD) and 19 bilingual children with DLD, ranging in age from 5 to 8 years old. Parents’ and teachers’ reports correlated moderately with each other and significantly predicted children’s performance on language-specific measures of morphosyntax and semantics. Results yielded sensitivity of .90 and specificity of .63 when using a composite of parent and teacher reports in Spanish and English. Examination of structure loadings in follow-up analyses by grade showed that teachers’ report of English and parents’ report of Spanish were the strongest predictors of impairment in kindergarten. In second grade, the strongest predictors were parent and teacher reports in English. Implications for referral and identification are discussed.