Lisa M. Bedore|Elizabeth D. Peña|Ronald B. Gillam|Te?Wei Ho
Language sample measures and language ability in Spanish-English bilingual kindergarteners
The University of Texas at Austin
measures productivity sentence organization useful metrics quantifying language development language impairments monolingual bilingual children yet known measures within across languages informative evaluating language skills bilingual children purpose study evaluate measures language productivity organization two languages converge childrens measured language abilities bilingual english spanish assessment besa standardized measure language ability 170 kindergarten age children produced narrative language samples spanish english based wordless picture book included analysis samples analyzed number utterances number different words mean length utterance percentage grammatical utterances best predictors language ability measured besa scores english mlu english grammaticality spanish grammaticality results discussed relationship nature measures languages regard potential utility identifying low language ability bilingualthe reader able identify 1 narratives useful evaluating bilingual language ability 2 measures productivity sentence organization narratives best capture language ability development bilingual children 3 bilingual composite language ability across two languages determined 4 relationship exists measures productivity sentence organization language bilingual language ability score