Description

Background: Previous research on productivity of tense and agreement in English monolingual toddlers has established this measure as a valid indicator of a child’s emergent grammar (Hadley & Short, 2005). Recent work has also extended this validity to English monolingual preschoolers (Gladfelter & Leonard, 2013) and has established that Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers reflect a different pattern of English morpheme acquisition compared to their monolingual counterparts (Potapova & Pruitt-Lord, 2019). However, no such productivity measure exists in any language other than English. In order to accurately characterize the emerging language abilities of bilingual children, both languages must be assessed (Bedore et al., 2010). Given the lack of non-English productivity measures, this study will investigate one potential grammatical structure that may contribute to a productivity measure in Spanish: articles. Definite and indefinite articles in Spanish follow grammatical rules that require agreement in both gender and number with the nouns they accompany. This system results in opportunities for children to demonstrate knowledge of gender and number in Spanish in various contexts. This study will examine the accuracy and productivity of articles in the language samples of 32 Spanish-English bilingual preschool-aged children. Methods: Spanish language samples for 23 typically-developing preschool-aged children and 9 children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) between the ages of 4 and 6 form the data for the current study. Language samples were collected by trained research assistants, using age- and culturally-appropriate toys. All language samples were 15 to 20 minutes in length and consisted of play-based prompts and a narrative story retell task. From these language samples, we will examine children’s percent accuracy of articles and determine the number of unique instances in which articles were used to calculate productivity of articles. Expected Results: We expect the children in this sample to demonstrate high accuracy of articles, given their prevalence in Spanish grammar. However, we expect typically developing children to demonstrate a higher productivity score compared to their DLD peers, as this pattern has been established in previous research. This study will provide unique information as to how articles and productivity can be used in the assessment of Spanish-English bilingual children.