Bilingual Language Development

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A little over a quarter percent of preschool-aged children came from bilingual households in the year 2008. The majority of these children were also from Spanish speaking backgrounds. Because this growth trend is expected to continue in the years to come, it is necessary to assess the language development of not only monolingual English speaking children, but Spanish speaking children as well. Another reason that this assessment is necessary is because speech language pathologists show a lack of confidence when treating bilingual children in a recent survey. Since there is a shortage of bilingual speech language pathologists, the monolingual ones need to come up with ways to beneficially serve the linguistically diverse children. For example, …show more content…

This means that children who are not typically developing in language might have deficits in these certain aspects of language development. Conventional gestures are gestures that are used within a cultural group. This kind of gestures will vary throughout culture, this making sense as to why it would be most associated with language because there are many different gestures to go along with many different languages. Complexity of play includes schemes of symbolic play, but also focuses on a more creative and functional use of objects. Children with DLD compared to those who are TL, showed less complex play. Number of different words is the number of different words the child used throughout the activity, and for those with DLD showed a less amount of words than those who are TL. However, this information was not accurately found through play measures. To receive accurate results, in this case the difference of communicative development between TL and DLD children, they had to participate in play-based activities. This means that the activities would be somewhat structured and …show more content…

Choosing to use Spanish speaking toddlers with and without DLD provides new information on situations that were not being able to be handled. Distinguishing the difference between DLD children and TL children is one thing. But going that extra mile to determine what cultural factors and bilingualism have on children as they develop in language and communication helps recognize where problems may start and how to treat them. This study helped monolingual speech language pathologists learn how to deal with bilingual speaking children with language deficits instead of just referring them elsewhere. It provides great techniques to use in order to help bilingual children with DLD and provides information of where the problems are. So now, instead of having no business in this kind of category, parents, children, and speech language pathologists can all work together in play-based activities, as did the study. With this important knowledge, children of different languages and cultures can all be beneficially

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