There is a fundamental lack of empirical evidence on which service providers can base their treatment decisions with bilingual children with developmental language impairment. This exploratory project investigates the absolute and relative effectiveness of three different training conditions on language outcomes in bilingual school-age children with """"""""specific"""""""" or primary language impairment (PLI). Participants are 48 Spanish-English bilingual children, 6-to-10 years-old, who are randomly assigned to one of the three training conditions. Two of the training conditions, English-only and Bilingual (Spanish-English), are language-based treatments designed to investigate possibilities and constraints on cross-language generalization in bilingual PLI. The third condition, Cognitive training, is a nonlinguistic treatment designed to investigate the potential of cross-domain (cognition to language) generalization, providing insight into the causal nature of PLI. Training in each condition is implemented four days per week in 90 minute sessions for eight consecutive weeks by a nationally certified speech-language pathologist. Response to training is determined using multiple outcome measures in Spanish and English, as well as on select cognitive processing measures. These measures will be administered prior to and immediately following training as well as three months after the completion of training. Results from this project will provide unique insight into cross-language transfer in bilingual children and advance understanding of the general PLI profile with respect to relationships between basic cognitive processing and higher level language skills. Study findings will also directly contribute to the development of more effective treatment methods for linguistically diverse children with PLI.
This exploratory project investigates the effectiveness of three different training conditions on language outcomes in bilingual school-age children with """"""""specific"""""""" or primary language impairment (PLI). Study findings will directly contribute to the development of more effective treatment methods for linguistically diverse children with PLI.
