Anny P. Castilla, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in CSD, State University of New York – Fredonia, Fredonia, NY

Dr. Anny Castilla completed her clinical degree as a speech-language pathologist in La Universidad del Valle, in Cali, Colombia. In 2008, she obtained her doctorate degree at The University of Toronto. Currently, Dr. Castilla is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Disorders and Sciences at SUNY Fredonia in New York.

It is my pleasure to share my experience and knowledge on the use of narratives as a language assessment tool in Spanish-speaking (SS) children. I have worked with narratives since I began my doctoral work in 2003. In my own research, I have used narratives to examine typical and atypical language in preschool SS. In other work with my colleagues, I have also used narratives to examine the influence of Spanish-language skills on the acquisition of English and the effect of a Spanish supplemental program on Spanish language development.

Why SLPs should incorporate narrative assessment into their evaluations?

The use of narratives as a tool to assess productive language skills in children is highly encouraged because of their high ecological validity – children are often exposed to and asked to produce narratives – and their association with academic skills (Hughes, McGillivray & Schmidek, 1997). Narrative production is a task with high language demands allowing the assessment of productive language skills such as vocabulary, morphosyntax, language complexity and story grammar (Klecan-Aker & Hedrick, 1985; Paul & Smith, 1993; Scott, 1988). In addition, narrative tasks are culturally appropriate activities to assess language skills in SS preschool children (Castilla, 2008; Restrepo & Castilla, 2007). My own research indicates that measures of productive language derived from narratives are sensitive to developmental changes in SS children during the preschool years.

How to elicit a narrative and what language measures can be calculated from it?

My preferred method for narrative elicitation is story retelling. Children tend to be more productive if they do not have to create their own story.  I read the story while I am changing the pages of a book, and, once I am finished, I ask the child to repeat the story back to me. If the child is slow to repeat the story, I ask him/her to identify the main characters on the first page and then ask again to tell me the story. I say “y entonce que pasó?’ or “Y qué mas?” to encourage language production. I find that this methodology works very well with preschool children.

I record the child retelling me the story and later I transcribe and code. As previously mentioned, narratives can provide one with information on language complexity, vocabulary, grammatical development and story grammar. The following measures can be calculated from a narrative:

a)     Number of T-units and Mean Length of T-units. A Terminable Unit (T-Unit) is a main clause plus its subordinated clauses (Hunt, 1965). Subjectless sentences where the verb is conjugated are considered T-units. (Gutierrez-Clellen and Hofstetter, 1994). Count the number of T-units produced and the average length in words.

b)    Subordination Index. Subordination Index is the number of dependent and independent clauses divided by the total number of T-units. A SUB-I score of one indicates that children used only simple sentences in their story retellings. A higher subordination index score indicates that the child can produce complex sentences.

c)     Number of Grammatical Errors per T-unit. Calculate the sum of all grammatical errors divided by the total number of T-units. This will give you a grammaticality index (Restrepo, 1998).

d)     Number of different words produced in the sample.

e)     Story grammar. I use the Index of Narrative Complexity (Petersen, Gillam & Gillam, 2008) to code for story grammar. This tool works very well with narratives produced by SS children (Castilla & Hammer, 2010; Castilla, Hammer, Petersen & Spencer, in preparation).

My research suggests that all these previous measures, with the exception of number of grammatical errors per T-unit, increase with age during the preschool years in SS children.

How effective are narrative assessments as diagnostic tools for Spanish-speaking children?

One recommendation regarding language assessment for SS children is to use language measures obtained through the analysis of spontaneous language samples (Gutiérrez-Clellen, Restrepo, Bedore, Peña & Anderson, 2000; Restrepo & Gutierrez-Clellen, 2004). In fact, researchers have made significant advances in the identification of SS children with language disorders using spontaneous language samples (Bedore & Leonard, 2005; Restrepo, 1998; Gutierrez-Clellen and Simon-Cereijido, 2007). For example, researchers have determined that measures of sentence length (Bedore & Leonard, 2005; Simon-Cereijido & Gutierrez-Clellen, 2007; Restrepo, 1998) and indices of grammaticality (Simon-Cereijido & Gutierrez-Clellen, 2007; Restrepo, 1998) can discriminate SS children with language disorders from typically developing children. Narratives are considered samples of spontaneous language.

Preliminary data from a current research project carried out in my laboratory indicates that measures of language productivity, vocabulary and story grammar derived from a story-retelling task differentiate typically developing children from children with language disorders.  Currently, I am collecting data in both monolingual and bilingual populations to further advance our knowledge in this area.

References and Recommended Readings

Bedore, L., & Leonard, L. (2001). Grammatical morphology deficits in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 44, 905-924.

Bedore, L., & Leonard, L. (2005). Verb inflections and noun phrase morphology in the spontaneous speech of Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment. Applied Linguistics, 26, 195-225.

Castilla, A. P. & Hammer, K. (2010) Assessment of Narrative Development in Preschool Monolingual Spanish-Speaking Children. Presentation at the Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders, Madison, WI.

Castilla, A. P. (2009). Morphosyntactic Acquisition in monolingual 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old Spanish-speaking children. In V. Marrero & I. Pinera (Eds.) Linguistics: The Challenge of Clinical Application. Proceedings of the II International Conference on Clinical Linguistics. Euphonia Ediciones: Madrid, Spain.

Castilla, A.P., Restrepo, M.A. & Pérez-Leroux, A.T. (2009). Individual differences and language interdependence in Spanish-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism.

Gazella, J., & Stockman, I. J. (2003). Children’s story retelling under different modality and task conditions: Implications for standardizing language sampling procedures. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 12, 61-72.

Gutierrez-Clellen, V. F., & Hofstetter, R. (1994). Syntactic complexity in Spanish narratives: A developmental study. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 37, 645-654.

Gutierrez-Clellen, V. F., Restrepo, M. A., Bedore, L., Peña, L., & Anderson, R. (2000). Language sample analysis: Methodological considerations. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in the Schools, 31, 88-98.

Hunt, K. (1965). Grammatical structures written at three grade levels. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Hughes, D., McGillivray, L. & Schmidek, M. (1997). Guide to narrative language: Procedures for assessment. Austin, TX: PRO-ED Inc.

Klecan-Aker, J.S. & Hedrick, D.L. (1985). A study of the syntactic language skills of normal school-age children.  Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 16, 187-198.

Loban, W. (1976). Language development: Kindergarden through grade twelve. Research Report No. 18. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Miller, J. F., & Chapman, R. S. (1996). SALT: A Computer program for the systematic analysis of language transcripts. Madison, WI: Language Analysis Lab, Waisman Center.

Peterson, D.B., Laing Gillam, S., Gillam, R.B. (2008) Emerging procedures in narrative assessment: The index of narrative complexity. Topics in Language Disorders, 28 (2), 115-130.

Restrepo, M. A. (1998). Identifiers of predominantly Spanish-speaking children with language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 41, 1398-1411.

Restrepo, M.A., Castilla, A.P. Schwanenflugel, P., Pritchett, S., Hamilton, C. & Arboleda, A. (2010) Sentence length, complexity and growth in Spanish-speaking children attending English-only and bilingual preschool programs. Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools.

Restrepo, M.A., & Castilla, A. (2007). Language sample elicitation and analysis as a research and clinical tool for Latino children. In. J.G. Centeno, K.L. Obler, & R. Anderson (Eds.), Communication disorders in Spanish speakers: Theoretical, research and clinical aspects. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Restrepo, M. A., & Gutierrez-Clellen, V. F. (2004). Grammatical impairments in Spanish/English-speaking children. In B. Goldstein (Ed.), Bilingual language development and disorders in Spanish-English speakers (pp.213-134). Baltimore, Maryland: Paul H. Brookes.

Restrepo, M.A., Castilla, A.P., Schwanenflugel, P., Neuharth-Pritchett, S.,  Hamilton, C. & Arboleda, A. (in press). Effects of a supplemental Spanish oral language program on sentence length, complexity, and grammaticality in Spanish-speaking children attending English-only Preschools. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in the Schools.

Simon-Cereijido, G., & Gutierrez-Clellen, V. (2007) Spontaneous language markers of Spanish language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 317-339.

Nancy Castilleja, M.A., CCC-SLP, Pearson Assessments (Publisher), San Antonio, TX

Nancy is a speech-language pathologist specializing in early language development and multicultural issues. Nancy currently is a Senior Product Manager for the speech and language products at Pearson Assessment. Prior to this role, Nancy was a Senior Research Director at Harcourt Assessment, developing norm-referenced assessments for early childhood populations and for Spanish-speaking children. Nancy’s clinical experience includes working with infants/toddlers in community settings, children in Head Start programs, and elementary through high school students with severe developmental delays in school settings.

Spanish language assessments available in our field range from simple translations to Spanish language assessments developed from “the ground floor up.” As you review Spanish assessments to determine if they will meet your needs, you will find them described as “translations,” “adaptations,” “Spanish editions,” or “Spanish assessments.”

How Translations and Adaptations Differ

Some assessments available in Spanish are direct translations of currently available English language assessments. Generally, a translated test is one in which there are no modifications to the administration directions, test stimuli, item order, or scoring rules. Research data may or may not be collected to validate the use of the test with Spanish speakers. A back translation, a process in which the translated Spanish test is translated back into English by an independent translator, is sometimes conducted so that the content of the two tests can be compared. A back translation is done to verify that the two tests are assessing similar content. When a test is translated, the methods used to develop the translation should be described and “empirical and logical evidence should be provided for score reliability and the validity of the translated test score inferences for the uses intended in the linguistic groups to be tested” (AERA, et al. 1999).

When an adaptation of an English version is created, linguistic and cultural differences among populations are taken into account to create an assessment that measures the construct as closely as possible in Spanish (International Test Commission, 2010).Wording of the administration directions and/or the stimulus items may be modified to reflect the most appropriate wording or concepts in Spanish. The test items may or may not be reordered based on research with Spanish speakers. When a test is adapted for use in another language, the test developer should provide documentation of the rationale for the adaptations incorporated into the test, and information about how score differences should be interpreted. Scores based on research obtained from administering the adapted test to Spanish speakers (cut scores or percentile ranks) may be reported in the test manual.

Translated and adapted tests can have certain limitations—certain concepts in English may be unfamiliar to Spanish speakers and/or may not translate well from one language to the other. Important language skills that exist only in Spanish and differentiate children who have a disorder from those who do not may or may not be represented in the test.

Despite these concerns, well-developed translations and adaptations can be clinically useful. For example, you may choose to use one to:

• work with an interpreter to obtain general information about a child’s language skills that you may not be able to obtain through direct observation or parent interview.
• use the test as a criterion-referenced measure to obtain information about a child’s language skills, keeping in mind that failed test items may not necessarily be indicative of a language disorder for Spanish speakers.
• use the research data reported for the test (e.g., means, standard deviations, cut scores, or percentile ranks), keeping in mind that the Spanish research sample is often very small, and therefore, less accurate in differentiating typical from atypical development than the English edition. Data that are provided in the test manual can give you an idea of relative item difficulties, and the results should be interpreted as additional information to parent/teacher input, language sampling, and dynamic assessment results.

You should not:

• administer items that you believe are inappropriate or unfamiliar for the child you are testing.
• use the discontinue rules from the English edition due to differences in the item difficulties. Administer the entire subtest/test, if possible, to obtain as much information about the child as possible.
• convert the raw scores you obtained to standard scores using the English norms, due to the differences in the item difficulties and demographic differences between English and Spanish speakers
• assume that a translated/adapted test has the accuracy of the norm-referenced English edition.

Spanish Editions

Some Spanish assessments are actually Spanish editions of assessments that were originally developed for English-speaking children, e.g., PLS–4 Spanish [Zimmerman, et al., 2002], CELF Preschool−2 Spanish [Wiig, et al., 2009], CELF−4 Spanish [Wiig, et al., 2006,] and the Batería III Woodcock-Muñoz [Woodcock, et al., 2005]. A Spanish edition is one in which the test developers use the test theoretical model and formats developed from an existing English assessment and develop a parallel version of the test, with new test items, new art, and adaptations that make the test appropriate for Spanish speakers (such as additional practice items). Research is conducted so that the final item set differentiates children with a language disorder from those who are demonstrating a typical pattern of development. Unlike adaptations, Spanish editions incorporate language structures specific to Spanish, and test items are ordered based on Spanish developmental milestones and the performance of research conducted with Spanish- speaking children. Just like on the English edition, the Spanish edition test items are ones that typically developing children can do and children with disorders cannot.

Spanish Assessments Built “From the Ground Floor Up”

Not all Spanish assessments are developed with an English edition as the starting point. The Bilingual English Spanish Assessment [BESA, Peña, et al., in development] included two assessments that can be used to evaluate semantics, syntax, pragmatics, and phonology—an English assessment and a Spanish assessment. The Spanish portion of the BESA was developed based on research related to Spanish language development and cultural issues related to assessing Spanish-speaking children. The test construct, administration directions, and test stimuli are developed in Spanish to target Spanish language milestones rather than aligning the general test construct to an English edition and adding or modifying test items for the Spanish portion of the test. The English edition of BESA targets appropriate milestones for English speakers. Neither the test formats nor test items necessarily overlap in the two tests.

How do you know if a test is a translation, adaptation, Spanish edition, or built from the ground floor up?

Check the description in the test manual, in the catalog, or on the website! While this article described general processes for developing translations versus full Spanish editions, the development process for Spanish language tests may differ significantly from one test to another. Questions you will want to ask when determining if a test will meet your needs:

How was the content developed?

Translation/adaptation

• Is the test a translation of the English edition?
• Were any of the administration procedures or test stimuli changed to reflect Spanish language development?

Spanish edition

• How was the test construct developed?
  • Is the Spanish edition designed specifically for Spanish-speakers?
    • Is the test construct based on Spanish language development?
    • Is the test construct unique to this assessment?
    • Are the test items and formats based on Spanish language development?
  • Is the Spanish edition based on a theory adapted from an English version of the test?
    • If so, how was the test adapted to take Spanish language development into account?
    • Are the test items different from those on the English edition?
    • Are the test items ordered based on development or performance patterns of Spanish speaking children?

What type of research was conducted with the test items?

• Were there multiple research phases?
  • Ideally, there would be multiple phases (pilot, tryout, and standardization) to refine the administration directions and test items and identify final item order for standardization.
• How many examinees were involved in the studies?
  • At standardization, there should be no fewer than 50 examinees for each norm or age group reported.
• How were examiners and examinees selected for the studies?
• Where was the data collected?
  • Are there multiple sites?
  • Was the data collected in the United States? Outside the United States?
  • Is the data based on the general U.S. population, the Hispanic population living in the U.S. or on some other basis?
• Was research conducted with both typically developing individuals and individuals identified as having a disorder?
• How were individuals identified for the clinical study?
• Are reliability and validity studies reported in the test manual?
  • Are reliability and validity values in the acceptable ranges (see McCauley, 2001)
  • Are reliability and validity values comparable to the English edition?

Even if you use a test that was fully developed with Spanish-speaking children in mind and with complete normative information, test results provide only one piece of evidence about the child’s skills—how he or she performs on language tasks relative to his or her age-peers. Test results must always be evaluated in light of information you obtain from parent and teacher interviews and with observations of the child in the classroom and with peers. Obtaining a complete picture of a child’s performance in multiple settings enables you to determine if the Spanish-speaking child you are evaluating has a language difference or a language disorder requiring focused intervention.

International Test Commission (2010). International Test Commission Guidelines for Translating and Adapting Test [http://www.intestcom.org]

Joint Committee on Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing of the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education, 1999, Washington, D.C.

McCauley, R. J. (2001). Assessment of language disorders in children. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Peña, E.D., Gutierrez-Clellan, V., Iglesias, A., Goldstein B.A., Bedore, L. (in development). Bilingual English Spanish Assessment. Unpublished assessment tool.

Wiig, E.H., Secord, W.H., & Semel, E.M. (2006). Clinical evaluation of language fndamentals—fourth edition Spanish. San Antonio, TX: Pearson.

Wiig, E.H., Secord, W.H., & Semel, E.M. (2009). Clinical evaluation of language fundamentals preschool—second edition Spanish. San Antonio, TX: Pearson.

Woodcock, R.W., Muñoz-Sandoval, A.F., McGrew, KS, Mather, N. (2005), Batería III Woodcock-Muñoz: Pruebas de habilidades cognitivas, Chicago, IL: Riverside.

Zimmerman, I.L., Steiner, V. G., & Pond, R. E. (2002) Preschool language scale—fourth edition Spanish. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.

Fereshteh Kunkel, Ph.D. CCC-SLP. Bilingual Speech-Language Pathologist, San José, CA

Fereshteh Kunkel earned a Bachelor’s of Arts degree from the University of New Mexico, with a double major in Communication Disorders and Spanish. During her undergraduate studies, she learned American Sign Language and spent a summer research internship at Gallaudet University. She received a master’s degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Texas at Dallas and completed her Clinical Fellowship Year serving monolingual English and Spanish-speaking elementary and middle school students. After completing research on the English, Spanish and Bilingual lexical development of Spanish-English speaking preschoolers, Fereshteh was awarded a Ph.D. in Communicative Sciences and Disorders from the University of Texas at Dallas. Currently, she works for Bilingual Therapies as a bilingual clinician evaluating and providing speech and language therapy in Spanish, Persian and English to young children in San José, California.

The purpose of December’s blog is to introduce clinicians to the vocabulary checklist of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences English and Spanish form and to discuss how this tool is used to calculate a Bilingual score, otherwise known as a total conceptual score. Before discussing the organization and norming of the inventory, a definition and overview of the lexicon as well as a general description of English, Spanish, and Bilingual lexical development will be given. Finally, a summary and discussion of the questionnaire and other relevant information will be provided.

The lexicon or productive vocabulary is often defined as the “mental dictionary.” The lexicon is the earliest reflection of a child’s knowledge of language because it precedes multi-word combinations and syntax (Pearson, 1998). It is also fundamental to language learning and use because it serves as a building block for other linguistic domains (Bassano, Maillochon, & Eme, 1998; Kirk & Pisoni, 2000). Since productive vocabulary can be used to predict language delay, and since with age and language experience there is parallel growth of lexical abilities (Pearson, 1998), studies of this linguistic domain are timely, especially for the bilingual population. Additionally, vocabulary scores are strongly associated with general cognitive and academic skills, with a high correlation between vocabulary and intelligence, and with other language behaviors associated with school related tasks (Pearson, 1998). Research has demonstrated that Spanish monolingual development resembles that for English in rates and patterns of lexical production (Hernandez-Pina, 1979; Peraita, 1986) and that bilingual acquisition utilizes analogous linguistic systems as monolingual development, and proceeds in a comparable sequence (De Houwer, 1995) and rate as in monolingual children (Patterson, 2004; Pearson, Fernandez, & Oller, 1993). However, researchers such as Pearson et al. (1993) also emphasize that failure to measure both languages in the bilingual’s lexicon would significantly undervalue their productive vocabulary skills. It is precisely for this reason that clinicians should establish the linguistic milestones for their bilingual population using appropriate tools, such as the English and Spanish MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory, so that an accurate evaluation of the student’s lexical development can be established and intervention can be provided when benchmarks are not met (De Houwer, 1995; Pearson, 1998).

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory “Words and Sentences” (CDI) form (Fenson et al., 1993) is a parent questionnaire commonly used to measure the productive vocabulary of English-speaking children ages 16-30 months old. The vocabulary portion consists of 680 words organized into 22 semantic categories (e.g., animals, toys, and food) and syntactic categories including nouns, verbs, and adjectives (Fenson et al., 1993). It was normed on a large population of monolingual English-speaking children, representing a socioeconomic status that was higher than the national average based on 1990 U.S. census information. The Inventario del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas “Palabras y Enunciados” (IDHC) (Jackson-Maldonado et al., 2003) measures the productive vocabulary of Spanish-speaking children ages 16-30 months old. It consists of a 680-word Spanish productive vocabulary checklist organized into 23 categories. The Spanish IDHC has one more lexical category than the English CDI since “preposiciones/artículos” and “locativos” are split into two separate categories, instead of one category (“prepositions/locations”), as in the English form. Although the format of the inventories is similar for the English and Spanish questionnaires, the IDHC is not simply a translation of the CDI, since it was developed with consideration for the cultural and linguistic variations of Mexican Spanish (Jackson-Maldonado et al., 1993). In addition, it was normed on a large group of monolingual Spanish-speaking toddlers of a higher socioeconomic status than the national average. Thus, caution is advised when interpreting data for children whose socioeconomic profile does not closely match that of the norming group (Jackson-Maldonado et al., 2003). For both the English CDI and Spanish IDHC, parents simply mark on the questionnaire those words that their child currently produces from the list of words organized by lexical category (e.g., clothes, body parts). This format decreases the potential for invalid estimates of productive vocabulary since adults do not have to rely solely on their memory for the words their child produces (Pearson, 1998; Pearson & Fernandez, 1994). A single-language vocabulary score can then be calculated by tallying the total number of words marked on the vocabulary checklist out of a possible 680, which represents the total number of words produced in each language individually.

A Bilingual, or total conceptual score, is derived from a list developed by Marchman (1999) of the conceptual matches between the English and Spanish form. The Bilingual score is necessary since bilingual children’s productive vocabulary is distributed across two languages. This score, therefore, not only accounts for overlapping words between English and Spanish but also those words used in one language that are not used in the other. Using a single language score exclusively would neglect a significant portion of bilingual children’s productive vocabulary, thus underestimating lexical knowledge (Pearson et al., 1993). Although the Bilingual score is calculated based on the verbal labels for concepts on the CDI and IDHC, it does not simply represent a summation of English total vocabulary and Spanish total vocabulary scores. Instead, the Bilingual score reflects the following guidelines: (1) a concept has more than one verbal label in English (e.g., chicken, hen) but only one label in Spanish (e.g., gallina), (2) a concept is represented in only one of the languages (e.g., rooster), or (3) a concept has multiple labels in both English (e.g., sofa, couch) and Spanish (e.g., sofá, sillón). The Bilingual score, therefore, represents the number of concepts expressed regardless of language.

In summary, clinicians working with bilingual children can use the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory to establish the English, Spanish and Bilingual lexical skills of their students. Since lexical development is important to later language learning, tools such as the Communicative Development Inventory “Words and Sentences” and the Inventario del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas “Palabras y Enunciados” can be used to determine a child’s present level of communication while also taking into consideration their language skills as a whole. The inventories have been adapted to other languages, including Chinese, American Sign Language, and dialects such as Cuban Spanish, among others, so that clinicians who work with children that speak languages other than Spanish can measure the lexical skills of their clients. In addition to the long forms described here, short forms are available as well as a new CDI III form for children ages 30 to 37 months. Clinicians are encouraged to visit the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories website for further details and information (e.g., the list of matched concepts for calculating the bilingual score) including ordering the questionnaire and accompanying manual (visit www.sci.sdsu.edu/cdi/).

References

Bassano, D., Maillochon, I., & Eme, E. (1998). Developmental changes and variability in the early lexicon: A study of French children’s naturalistic productions, Journal of Child Language, 25, 493-531.

De Houwer, A. (1995). Bilingual language acquisition. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney(Eds.), The handbook of child language (pp. 199-250). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Fenson, L., Dale, P., Reznick, J., Thal, D., Bates, E., Hartung, J., Pethic, S., & Reilly, J. (1993). The MacArthur communicative development inventories: User’s guide and technical manual. San Diego, CA: Singular Publishing.

Hernandez-Pina, F. (1979). Etapas en la adquisición del lenguaje: Estudio de un caso concreto, Infancia y aprendizaje, 8, 23-32.

Jackson-Maldonado, D., Thal, D., Marchman, V., Bates, E., & Gutierrez-Clellen,V. (1993). Early lexical development of Spanish-speaking infants and toddlers, Journal of Child Language, 20, 523-549.

Jackson-Maldonado, D., Thal, D., Fenson, L., Marchman, V., Newton, T., & Conboy, B. (2003). MacArthur inventarios del desarrollo de habilidades comunicativas: User’s guide and technical manual. Baltimore: Brookes Publishing.

Marchman, V. (1999). Scoring program for the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (English and Spanish) [Computer Program]. The University of Texas at Dallas.

Patterson, J. (2004). Comparing bilingual and monolingual toddlers’ expressive vocabulary size: Revisiting Rescorla and Achenbach 2002 [Letter to the Editor]. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47, p. 1213.

Pearson, B. (1998). Assessing lexical development in bilingual babies and toddlers, The International Journal of Bilingualism, 2, 347-372.

Pearson, B., & Fernandez, M. (1994). Patterns of language interaction in the lexical growth in two languages of bilingual infants and toddlers, Language Learning, 44, 617-653.

Pearson, B., Fernandez, S., & Oller, K. (1993). Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: Comparison to monolingual norms, Language Learning, 43, 93-120.

Peraita, H. (1986). Desfase entre la producción y la comprensión del léxico en niños de 24 a 36 meses de edad, Infancia y aprendizaje, 35, 11-24.

Raúl Rojas, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA

Raúl Rojas received his M.A. in Speech-Language Pathology from Temple University, and provided bilingual (Spanish-English) SLP services in the schools for six years.  Currently he is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Temple University.  Raúl’s primary research area of interest is child language, specifically bilingual language development in typically developing children and in children with language disorders.

As you may or may not know, I have an addiction to SALT.  Not to the potassium-sodium-laced mineral, however.  Rather, I am addicted to the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) software program.  Joking aside, I have been engaged with developing the functionality of SALT for bilingual (Spanish-English) language sampling since 1998.  Currently, the latest version available is the SALT 2008 Bilingual Spanish-English (SE) version (Miller & Iglesias, 2008). For this month’s blog, I will:

• Describe SALT Bilingual SE
• Outline the clinical benefits of using SALT Bilingual SE
• Address common questions and concerns
• Discuss planned updates

Why should You use SALT Bilingual SE?
First and foremost, best practices recommend language sampling as a part of any evaluation of language (Paul, 2006).  There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most obvious is that language sampling allows one to measure connected, spontaneous language output.  Most of us have struggled eliciting specific grammatical structures, such as the preterit tense, within a sentence production subtest of an unnamed formal assessment tool in Spanish.  After a seemingly endless eternity, the child fails to produce the target conjugation, which will negatively impact his standard score.  However, upon leaving the testing room, Ramiro reminds you: “¡yo lo vi ayer speech-teacher!”  Then you find yourself, again, pondering whether Ramiro’s standard score on formal test X is truly indicative of his language skills or not.  After all, Ramiro decided to conveniently conjugate the elusive target (the preterit), just not during your formal testing.  Why not measure the expressive language skills of your clients in Spanish and English when they are actually speaking?  Even better, why not do it within a structured and academically relevant task (Miller, Heilmann, Nockerts, Iglesias, Fabiano, & Francis, 2006), such as retelling a story?  As the clinician, you model the task (tell the story) prior to the child’s retell, minimizing intimidation and unfamiliarity of the task.

The advantages and clinical benefits that SALT Bilingual SE offers you are straightforward.  These benefits are perhaps best defined by a series of questions regarding your goals as a speech-language pathologist serving bilingual children.

• Do I want to appropriately compare the narrative Spanish and English language skills of my bilingual children to those of other bilingual children?
• Do I want to move beyond informal assessment that relies exclusively on clinical judgment?
• Do I want to access measurable data of language skills, not only for assessment purposes, but also to track progress over time within therapy?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then the next question should be asking yourself is: “why am I not using SALT Bilingual SE?”

What is SALT Bilingual SE?
Fundamentally, SALT Bilingual SE is a clinical tool that is primarily used for assessing the oral language skills of bilingual (Spanish-English) speakers.  The program allows you to appropriately analyze language transcripts from the bilingual, Spanish-speaking children in your caseload and compare the child’s performance to a large database of other English language Learners. The program features the largest available databases of bilingual children providing narrative language samples in Spanish and English.  SALT Bilingual SE comes with two built-in reference databases: The Bilingual Spanish Story Retell and The Bilingual English Story Retell database.  Combined, these two databases contain over 2,000 Spanish and English retell narratives provided by bilingual, Spanish-speaking children from the United States in grades Kindergarten through third.  You can (and should) compare the language transcripts of the bilingual children in your caseload to those of the bilingual children in the Bilingual Spanish and English Story Retell databases.  Let’s take a step back and consider what this means.  Although we often criticize the lack of appropriate standardized assessment tools for bilingual (Spanish-English) children (e.g., test translations, monolingual norming samples, culturally inappropriate test stimuli), SALT Bilingual SE offers an appropriate, formal assessment tool of bilingual children’s narrative language production.  Further, although language sampling tends to fall under the umbrella of informal testing, comparisons done with SALT Bilingual SE provide performance information across a range of language domains (e.g., syntax/morphology, semantics, discourse, intelligibility, and others) for your client as well as your client’s standard deviation from the respective database on several measures (e.g., total utterances, MLU in words, number of different words, etc.).  Put another way: the “informal” component of your bilingual speech-language assessment protocol, supported by measurable, normative data, will be stronger than ever!  Watch as jaws drop at your next IEP meeting, with your SALT Bilingual SE analyses in hand.  Joy.

SALT Bilingual SE offers a number of editing tools to expedite and simplify transcription of bilingual (Spanish-English) language samples.  For example, SALT Bilingual SE allows you to mark accents, tildes, and use inverse symbols such as: “¿Será un sueño?”  Going further, with SALT Bilingual SE you can keep account for the vast morphological complexity of the verb system in Spanish.  Therefore, if a bilingual child commented on losing her little frogs (“se me perdieron mis ranitas”), SALT Bilingual SE will credit this child for conjugating the preterit (i.e., past) tense, using a diminutive to indicate size, and also the plural morpheme -s.  The program’s built-in verb conjugations (>450,000) and other inflections (>1,500) – such as diminutives, plurals, and pronominal clitics – help automate and demystify the process of tracking morphological use in Spanish.  In case you may be wondering, SALT Bilingual SE also accounts for morphological use in English, for those language samples you may collect in English or the samples that were “supposed to be in Spanish” but contain consistent code-switching.  In other words, SALT Bilingual SE allows you to track morphological use in Spanish and English, simultaneously.  For more in-depth information regarding bilingual sampling and SALT, please refer to Rojas and Iglesias (2006; 2009).

Questions and Answers
For the SALT-uninitiated, there are a number of common questions about the software program and its use.  Let’s attempt to address some of these common concerns with a question and answer session.

Q: Ok, so I am definitely getting SALT!  What if I have questions, where do I go for support?

A: Fortunately SALT comes with detailed, searchable documentation, built directly into its Help system.  The SALT Help system is contained contextually in any SALT window.  This means that SALT will provide Help information pertinent to the specific task you are working on.  Also, the SALT website (www.saltsoftware.com) contains a wealth of information, including several training modules.  These training modules cover everything from elicitation to analyses interpretation to case studies.  For example, let’s say you are not 100% comfortable with providing your clients with a Spanish model of a narrative.  Visit the SALT website, and you’ll find scripts for a number of Mercer Mayer’s “frog stories” as well as the corresponding audio samples in Spanish and English, that your clients can listen to.  If you purchase SALT Bilingual SE a copy of the wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969), is included as well as the corresponding script and audio sample.
See: http://www.saltsoftware.com/training/

Q: There are different versions of SALT.  Which version do I need?

A: The answer to this question depends on what your needs are.  If your caseload consists of primarily Spanish-English bilingual children, SALT Bilingual SE is the version you need.  If your caseload consists of both monolingual English speaking and Spanish-English bilingual children, then you may want both SALT Bilingual SE and SALT English.  The only differences between the two versions, is that SALT English has a number of reference databases composed of monolingual English speakers.

SALT Research is targeted for folks who want access to all the reference databases, and to research tools that facilitate working with large data sets.  SALT Instructional is available to college or university instructors.  Finally, the SALT Student CD is available for students.
See: http://www.saltsoftware.com/salt/

Q: I have an older version of SALT.  Should I upgrade?

A: Although the reference databases are available for download to SALT users, every new version of SALT is equipped with expanded functionality for both transcribing and analyzing language transcripts.  Also, if you own an older version of SALT, the most recent versions of SALT are available with discounted upgrade pricing.
See: http://www.saltsoftware.com/salt/upgrade/

Q: I know that SALT runs on PCs, but I have a Mac.  Can I run SALT on my Mac?

A: SALT is a Windows-based software program. Therefore, it will not run natively on a Mac operating system.  That being said, any Intel-based Apple computer can run Windows applications, if Windows is installed.
See: http://www.saltsoftware.com/salt/support/faq/mac.cfm

Q: SALT Bilingual SE is designed for Spanish-English bilingual speakers. Are there any other languages available?

A: As of October 2009, there is a Turkish SALT version and a French SALT version.  Turkish SALT has a conversational database.  French SALT does not have any reference databases, but does have built-in conjugations for French verbs.  Please contact the wonderful SALT folks, if you are interested in these other versions of SALT.
See: http://www.SALTSoftware.com/company/contact/

Planned updates
Updated versions to all SALT versions will be released at the 2009 annual convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and will also be available online from the SALT website.  Expanded functionality will characterize all updated SALT versions.  Two areas of expanded functionality will be transcription and analyses options for tracking the subordination index (measure of syntactic complexity measure) and the narrative scoring scheme (index of narrative skills).

References
Mayer, M. (1969). Frog, where are you? New York: Dial Press.

Miller, J., Heilmann, J., Nockerts, A., Iglesias, A, Fabiano, L., & Francis, D. (2006). Oral language and reading in bilingual children. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 21, 30-43.

Miller, J.F., & Iglesias, A. (2008). Systematic analysis of language transcripts (SALT), Bilingual SE Version 2008 [Computer software]. SALT Software, LLC.

Rojas, R., & Iglesias, A. (2006). Bilingual (Spanish-English) narrative language analyses: Why and how? Perspectives on Communication Disorders and Sciences in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Populations, 13(1), 3-8.

Rojas R., & Iglesias, A. (2009, March 3). Making a case for language sampling: Assessment and intervention with (Spanish-English) language learners. The ASHA Leader, 14(3), 10-13.

This month’s video, presented by Brian Goldstein, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, will cover the assessment of phonological skills in bilingual children.  The following topics will be discussed:

• Completing a case history specific to phonological skills.
• Completing an independent analysis.
• Completing a relational analysis.
• Linking results from the assessment to intervention goals.

Please take a few minutes to view the video and then post your comments or questions by clicking the comments link at the bottom of this posting.