Phonological Variation Among Dual Language Learners

Poster presentation at SCSHA 2022.
Authors: Sarah Kate Coleman, Andrea Vargas, Morgan Roberts,  & Lisa Fitton
The final formatted poster can be found under "All Student Posters".

Sarah Kate Coleman

 Sarah Kate is a first-year Master’s student in the speech-language pathology program at the University of South Carolina. She attended UofSC for her undergraduate career, where she earned a B.S. in Public Health. This project was completed as an undergraduate senior thesis under the direction of Dr. Lisa Fitton. ​

Andrea Vargas

Andrea is a first-year Master’s student in the speech-language pathology program at the University of South Carolina. She attended UofSC for her undergraduate career, where she earned a B.S. in Biological Sciences and a B.A. in Spanish.

Morgan Roberts

Morgan is a first-year Master’s student in the speech-language pathology program at the University of South Carolina. She attended the University of Alabama for her undergraduate career, where she earned a B.A. in Communicative Disorders and Spanish.

Why did we do this project?

The purpose of this project is to contribute broadly to informing bilingual phonological assessment practice by examining phonological variation in Spanish-English speaking children’s responses on the English sentence repetition task. Twenty Spanish-English speaking kindergarteners were audio recorded as they completed the English sentence repetition task of the BESA (Peña et al., 2014). There was substantial variation in the phonology observed within students’ responses. No significant correlations were identified between the number of phonological variations present and score on the task. These findings highlight the need for research informing best practices for assessing the phonological development of bilingual children.

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Method

"The participant sample included in the present study was a subsample obtained from data already collected from Spanish-English speaking children in grades 4K – Grade 1. All participants attended a local elementary school, where data was collected in-person during the fall of 2019 and spring of 2020. The children completed a battery of dual language and literacy assessments. These included subtests from the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA; Peña et al., 2014) and the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test 4: Spanish-Bilingual Edition (EOWPVT-4 SBE; Martin, 2013). Trained undergraduate and graduate research assistants administered the assessments in Spanish and English. For the BESA sentence repetition task, raw and norm-referenced scores were obtained in both Spanish and English. For the EOWPVT-4 SBE, raw and norm-referenced scores were obtained for both Spanish and English. A conceptual vocabulary score was also computed, which gave participants credit for correct responses in either English or Spanish." (Coleman, 2021, pp. 13)

Sources

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The data for this presentation were taken from Sarah Kate's senior thesis, cited here:

Coleman, S.K. (2021). Phonological Variation Among Young Spanish-English Dual Language Learners on An English Sentence Repetition Task ​[Unpublished bachelor's thesis]. University of South Carolina