Description

Does cognate status affect performance in a Spanish semantic assessment in bilingual children? There is a shortage of assessments designed to measure language and literacy among Spanish-English bilingual students. In order to address this issue, we developed items for a new semantic matching task: (palabras en parejas/PEP) intended to measure oral language skills in Spanish. This assessment was developed as a progress monitoring tool for tracking growth in Spanish oral language ability for children in TK/PK-3rd grade (Connor, 2019). When this assessment is paired with the pre existing English assessment, it is able to give teachers a more detailed look into children's language skills which will ideally lead to better differentiated literacy instruction for bilingual students. During the development of items, researchers scored each word using an adapted version of the Crosslinguistic Overlap Scale for Phonology (COSP; Kohner et al., 2004). The COSP was designed to measure the degree of phonological overlap in initial sound, number of syllables, vowels, and consonants. However, there are multiple ways of identifying cognates (Potapova, et al., 2016). Adaptations were made due to the fact that children would both see and hear words in our assessment so we needed to take into account both phonological and orthographic overlap. Additionally, the COSP uses English as the “base” language to determine cognate status; however, we were developing an assessment in Spanish. We adapted the tool to use Spanish as the base language when determining cognate status. The PEP assessment was then administered to 120 students in California and New York. Reliability on the adapted version of the COSP was high (>.90) suggesting feasibility of use of this new version. Bivariate correlations between item accuracy and average cognate score revealed that there was a negative correlation (r=-0.193, p=.09). This suggests that items that had words that were Spanish-English cognates were more difficult for children to respond to in Spanish than items that did not have form/meaning overlap.