Emergent Bilinguals: the Relationship Between Child Language Proficiency and Language of Treatment on the Outcomes Children with Developmental Language Disorder

What this Trial Is About

Researchers are studying children aged 4 to 6 years who are emergent bilinguals with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), a condition that affects language learning and use. This study aims to understand how a child's proficiency in Spanish and English relates to the language used during speech therapy. Since bilingual children vary in language ability and severity of DLD, the research seeks to guide speech-language pathologists on whether to use monolingual or interleaved bilingual intervention to improve language skills and academic success. The study compares two types of speech therapy involving sentence recasts, an established method for treating grammatical difficulties. One group receives monolingual therapy entirely in the child's dominant language (Spanish or English), while the other group receives interleaved therapy alternating between dominant and non-dominant languages every few minutes. Both therapies are delivered by trained bilingual speech-language pathologists over 16 hours spread across 9 weeks, targeting specific language structures through frequent, attention-focused recasts. Participants will be assessed on their language abilities before, during, and after treatment using tasks that measure accuracy in producing specific sentence structures and general language complexity. Researchers will collect data approximately one month before treatment, midway, and two weeks after therapy completion. The study also monitors language development progress and the ability to benefit from treatment in both languages, ensuring children meet hearing and cognitive requirements. The total participation duration spans the 9-week treatment and the assessment periods.

Emergent Bilinguals: Child Language Proficiency and Language of Treatment