Bedore Lisa M, Peña Elizabeth D, Gillam Ronald B, Ho Tsung-Han
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, 1 University Station A1100, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
J Commun Disord. 2010 Nov-Dec;43(6):498-510. doi: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2010.05.002. Epub 2010 May 24.
Measures of productivity and sentence organization are useful metrics for quantifying language development and language impairments in monolingual and bilingual children. It is not yet known what measures within and across languages are most informative when evaluating the language skills of bilingual children. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how measures of language productivity and organization in two languages converge with children's measured language abilities on the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA), a standardized measure of language ability. 170 kindergarten age children who produced narrative language samples in Spanish and in English based on a wordless picture book were included in the analysis. Samples were analyzed for number of utterances, number of different words, mean length of utterance, and percentage of grammatical utterances. The best predictors of language ability as measured by the BESA scores were English MLU, English grammaticality, and Spanish grammaticality. Results are discussed in relationship to the nature of the measures in each of the languages and in regard to their potential utility for identifying low language ability in bilingual.
The reader will be able to identify (1) why narratives are useful for evaluating bilingual language ability, (2) which measures of productivity and sentence organization in narratives best capture language ability and development in bilingual children, (3) how a bilingual or composite language ability across two languages can be determined, and (4) what relationship exists between measures of productivity and sentence organization in each language with a bilingual language ability score.
生产力和句子组织的测量是量化单语和双语儿童语言发展及语言障碍的有用指标。在评估双语儿童的语言技能时，语言内部和跨语言的哪些测量最具信息量尚不清楚。本研究的目的是评估两种语言的语言生产力和组织测量如何与儿童在双语英语西班牙语评估（BESA）中的测量语言能力相契合，BESA是一种标准化的语言能力测量工具。分析纳入了170名幼儿园年龄儿童，他们根据一本无字图画书生成了西班牙语和英语的叙事语言样本。对样本进行了话语数量、不同单词数量、平均话语长度和语法话语百分比的分析。BESA分数所衡量的语言能力的最佳预测指标是英语平均话语长度、英语语法正确性和西班牙语语法正确性。结合每种语言测量的性质以及它们在识别双语儿童低语言能力方面的潜在效用对结果进行了讨论。
读者将能够确定（1）为什么叙事对评估双语语言能力有用，（2）叙事中生产力和句子组织的哪些测量最能捕捉双语儿童的语言能力和发展，（3）如何确定两种语言的双语或综合语言能力，以及（4）每种语言中生产力和句子组织的测量与双语语言能力分数之间存在什么关系。
