Shivabasappa P, Peña ED, Bedore LM. Developmental changes in the word co-occurrences of Spanish-English bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGY 2024:1-10. [PMID:
39169730 DOI:
10.1080/17549507.2024.2381467]
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Abstract
PURPOSE
The study aimed to understand how bilingual children with typical language development (TLD) and those with developmental language disorder (DLD) use frequent word co-occurrences in their narratives.
METHOD
We studied the change over time in the word co-occurrences used by 30 Spanish-English bilingual children with and without DLD (experimental group). An additional normative group consisted of 98 TLD Spanish-English bilingual first graders. Children narrated two Spanish and two English stories in kindergarten and first grade. Employing a Python program on the transcribed narratives, we extracted all adjacent two-word and three-word co-occurrences. From the normative group, the 90 most frequently occurring two-word and 90 most frequently occurring three-word co-occurrences were extracted. The type and tokens of word co-occurrences each child in the experimental group produced out of the 180 identified word co-occurrences were analysed.
RESULT
Overall, children at first grade produced more word co-occurrences types than in kindergarten. Children with DLD used fewer types of word co-occurrences but produced them as often as than their TLD peers. Children with DLD increased their word co-occurrences from kindergarten to first grade at the same rate although at a lower frequency. Children in both groups produced similar types and tokens of word co-occurrences in both Spanish and English, except tokens of two word co-occurrences. Children produced two word co-occurrences more often in English than in their Spanish narratives.
CONCLUSION
The results shed light on children with DLD's deficits in production of word co-occurrences, indirectly reflecting possible deficits in statistical pattern detection.
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