Lam Joseph Hin Yan, Wang Jiali, Wang Danyang, Anaya Jissel B, Bedore Lisa M, Peña Elizabeth D
School of Education, University of California, Irvine.
Department of Speech Language Pathology and Audiology, Towson University, MD.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2025 Apr 8;68(4):1866-1885. doi: 10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00171. Epub 2025 Mar 20.
The current study examines bilingual children's development of Spanish and English morphosyntax structures over the period of 1 year. Identification of morphosyntax forms clustered by difficulty can elucidate their development and guide clinicians to select appropriate targets for intervention and monitoring. Specifically, we aim to evaluate how morphosyntax performance of bilingual children at the initial time point is related to their performance 1 year later and whether longitudinal development is different for children with developmental language disorder (DLD).
A total of 199 bilingual children (165 typically developing children and 34 children with DLD) between 7 and 10 years old completed a morphosyntax cloze task in both English and Spanish twice with 1 year apart. First, within-participant analysis of variance was used to identify morphosyntax clusters. We then used cross-lag analysis to study the relationship between morphosyntax clusters over time.
Morphosyntactic structures were clustered by difficulty in Spanish and English. There are three clusters of 1-3 morphosyntactic structures in Spanish and four clusters of 2-4 morphosyntactic structures in English. Cross-lag analysis demonstrated that for both languages, children's performance on simple items at Year 1 predicted performance on more difficult items 1 year later. Multigroup analysis indicated that most associations between morphosyntax clusters across time were not different for children with and without DLD.
Findings on the difficulty levels of different morphosyntactic structures in Spanish-English bilingual children may provide implications for target selection when treating morphosyntax in this population. The study provides important insights into morphosyntactic change in bilingual school-age children in the United States, which are important to consider in bilingual language assessment and intervention.
本研究考察了双语儿童在1年时间里西班牙语和英语形态句法结构的发展情况。识别按难度聚类的形态句法形式可以阐明其发展过程，并指导临床医生选择合适的干预和监测目标。具体而言，我们旨在评估双语儿童在初始时间点的形态句法表现与其1年后的表现之间的关系，以及发育性语言障碍（DLD）儿童的纵向发展是否存在差异。
共有199名7至10岁的双语儿童（165名发育正常儿童和34名患有DLD的儿童），间隔1年用英语和西班牙语各完成了两次形态句法填空任务。首先，采用参与者内方差分析来识别形态句法聚类。然后，我们使用交叉滞后分析来研究不同时间点形态句法聚类之间的关系。
西班牙语和英语的形态句法结构按难度聚类。西班牙语中有1 - 3个形态句法结构的三个聚类，英语中有2 - 4个形态句法结构的四个聚类。交叉滞后分析表明两种语言中，儿童在第1年简单项目上的表现预测了1年后更难项目上的表现。多组分析表明，有和没有DLD的儿童在不同时间点形态句法聚类之间的大多数关联没有差异。
关于西班牙 - 英语双语儿童不同形态句法结构难度水平的研究结果，可能为该人群形态句法治疗时的目标选择提供启示。该研究为美国双语学龄儿童的形态句法变化提供了重要见解，这在双语语言评估和干预中是需要考虑的重要因素。
