Grammatical Characteristics of Vietnamese and English in Developing Bilingual Children

A Narrative Approach to Synthesizing Research on Vietnamese Bilingual and Monolingual Children

PURPOSE

This review article offers a narrativized synthesis of my research over the past 15+ years with Vietnamese-speaking children based on data collected from individual bilingual and monolingual children in preschool and elementary schools.

METHOD

I begin with a positionality narrative to describe who I am in relation to the research conducted. I provide an overview of the research program including tool building and how my research with bilinguals in the United States led me to international collaborations in Vietnam.

RESULTS

I present main findings from this body of work in three areas: typical bilingual development, reading performance in Vietnam, and characteristics of developmental language disorder in the Vietnamese language. Implications within each area are discussed in terms of clinical application and future research directions. Practitioners and researchers alike can freely access the Vietnamese assessment tools created and validated to date from our website, https://vietslp.sdsu.edu/.

CONCLUSIONS

This research overview aims to offer clinicians and researchers the sociocultural context for understanding the relevance of this body of research. It also serves as an invitation for new generations of scholars, particularly scholars of color, to see their own unique positionings and perspectives as valuable and necessary for scientific innovation and progress.

PRESENTATION VIDEO

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23929491.

Remote First-Language Assessment: Feasibility Study With Vietnamese Bilingual Children and Their Caregivers

PURPOSE

There is a shortage of bilingual speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in the United States. For Vietnamese, less than 1% of SLPs speak the language compared with a Vietnamese American population of > 2.1 million. This study examines the feasibility and social validity of remote child language assessment with the help of a caregiver to address the need for first language assessments among Vietnamese-speaking children.

METHOD

Twenty-one dyads of caregivers and typically developing children (aged 3-6 years) completed two assessment sessions in their first language, Vietnamese, using Zoom videoconferencing. Sessions were counterbalanced between two conditions in which either the clinician or the caregiver was the task administrator. Children's language samples were elicited using narrative tasks. Social validity was also assessed through caregiver and child questionnaires at the end of each session.

RESULTS

There were no significant differences between conditions on language sample measures nor the measures of social validity. Both caregivers and their children felt positively about the sessions. The caregivers' feelings were related to their perception of children's feelings about the sessions. Children's feelings were related to their Vietnamese language proficiency, caregiver-reported language ability, and whether they were born outside of the United States.

CONCLUSIONS

Findings build the evidence base for telepractice as an effective and socially valid service delivery model for bilingual children in the United States. This study supports the potential for caregivers as task administrators in a telepractice setting, making assessment in a child's first language more feasible and accessible. Future investigation is needed to extend results to bilingual populations with disorders.

Understanding (un)grammaticality in context: Evidence from young Spanish-English bilinguals over time

PURPOSE

Percent grammatical utterances (PGU) provides clinicians and researchers with meaningful information on young children's grammatical abilities (Eisenberg & Guo, 2016). However, work is still needed to place PGU within the context of conventional language sample measures and understand how PGU reflects grammatical development in bilingual populations. The current study focuses on Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers to examine: 1) change in Spanish and English PGU over one year of preschool English instruction, 2) associations between PGU and other language sample measures within each language and across time, and 3) the types and frequency of error patterns in each language.

METHOD

Play-based language samples were elicited in English and Spanish from bilingual children (n = 19) at the beginning and end of an instructional preschool year in English. PGU was derived from each sample along with other language sample measures (e.g., mean length of utterance). We examined change in PGU from Time 1 to Time 2, and correlations between Time 1 PGU and Time 2 PGU for each language. Specific grammatical errors were described in terms of their frequency in each language and stability across time.

RESULTS

Average English PGU increased from Time 1 to Time 2, and correlated with other language sample measures. Conversely, average Spanish PGU did not increase from Time 1 to Time 2, nor did PGU correlate with any other Spanish measure. Error patterns in each language reflected grammatical differences across English and Spanish.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results revealed distinct developmental patterns in bilingual children's first and second languages. Associations between time points and measures in English contrasted with disassociations in Spanish. Error patterns revealed more detailed information as to how bilingual children begin to acquire grammatical structures in each of their languages. We provide a case example to illustrate how grammaticality and error patterns can be used to characterize children's language abilities. We conclude with clinical implications of grammaticality in Spanish-English bilingual children.