Communication Sciences & Disorders

This study investigated grammatical gender processing in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children using a visual world paradigm with a 4-picture display where the target noun was heard with a gendered article that was either in a context where all distractor images were the same gender as the target noun (same gender; uninformative) or in a context where all distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun (different gender; informative). We investigated 32 bilingual children (ages 5;6-8;6) who were exposed to Spanish since infancy and began learning English by school entry. Along with the eye-tracking experiment, all children participated in a standardized language assessment and told narratives in English and Spanish, and parents reported on their child's current Spanish language use. The differential proportion fixations to target (target − averaged distractor fixations) were analyzed in two time regions with linear mixed-effects models (LME). Results show that prior to the target word being spoken, these bilingual children did not use the gendered articles to actively anticipate upcoming nouns. In the subsequent time region (during the noun), it was shown that there are differences in the way they use feminine and masculine articles, with a lack of use of the masculine article and a potential facilitatory use of the feminine article for children who currently use more Spanish than English. This asymmetry in the use of gendered articles in processing is modulated by current Spanish language use and trends with results found for bilingual and second-language learning adults.

Purpose To test the proposal that the tense deficit that has been demonstrated for children with specific language impairment (SLI) in other languages is also found in child Spanish and that low performance on tense-related measures can distinguish Spanish-speaking children with SLI from those without. Method The authors evaluated evidence from existing spontaneous production, elicited production, and grammaticality judgment studies of finiteness in child Spanish. They measured the relationship of 7 spontaneous speech measures with previous receptive and expressive measures of finiteness and performed a discriminant function analysis, using tense as the target variable, to classify monolingual child Spanish ( n = 55) as representing SLI or as typically developing (TD). Results Spontaneous speech measures correlated with the results of previous receptive and expressive measures of child Spanish that show a tense deficit. The SLI group was shown to have statistically lower scores than...

This entire process has been a grueling yet enlightening experience-from collaborating with others directly on research, to fixing a spreadsheet for months to working or even working with an undergraduate student. Dr. Lisa Bedore has been a wonderful source of knowledge and support. She has been extremely helpful every step of the way. As always, research has its ups and downs but it was wonderful to have three amazing ladies, Elizabeth Hunt, Amanda Lopez, and Samantha Lovgren-Uribe, to share this experience with. I learned so much from them and I know my thesis is better for their edits and kind, supportive words. Without their help, I would have not completed this thesis. I would like to extend a special thanks to Alyssa Garza for helping us finish a few spreadsheets when we were busily working on other chapters of the thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Peña for her edits and suggestions, especially those statistical in nature. Lastly, I would like to thank my friends and family for motivating me throughout this endeavor. vi

This study examines English performance on a set of 11 grammatical forms in Spanish-English bilingual, school-age children in order to understand how item difficulty of grammatical constructions helps correctly classify language impairment (LI) from expected variability in second language acquisition when taking into account linguistic experience and exposure. Three hundred seventy-eight children's scores on the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment-Middle Extension (Peña, Bedore, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, & Goldstein, 2008) morphosyntax cloze task were analyzed by bilingual experience groups (high Spanish experience, balanced English-Spanish experience, high English experience, ability (typically developing [TD] vs. LI), and grammatical form. Classification accuracy was calculated for the forms that best differentiated TD and LI groups. Children with LI scored lower than TD children across all bilingual experience groups. There were differences by grammatical form across bili...

The purpose of this analysis was to understand how grammatical morpheme production in Spanish for typically developing Spanish-English bilingual children relates to mean length of utterance in words (MLUw) and the extent to which different bilingual profiles influence order of grammatical morpheme acquisition. Participants included 228 Spanish-English bilingual children ages 4;0-7;6 (years;months). Grammatical morpheme accuracy was evaluated using an experimental version of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, 2014). MLUw data were calculated from children's narrative samples. Production accuracy of plural nouns, singular and plural definite articles, preterite tense, imperfect aspect, direct object clitics, prepositions, subjunctive, and conjunctions was calculated and analyzed as a function of MLUw in Spanish. Level of accuracy on these forms was compared for Spanish-dominant and English-dominant groups. Accuracy was...

Pengabdian masyarakat ini bertujuan untuk untuk menambah pengetahuan dan pemahaman guru dan siswa di SMK Pancasila Tambolaka Sumba Barat Daya serta beberapa sekolah menengah lainnya, mengenai penggunaan media online learning dalam proses pembelajaran selama pandemi Covid-19 yang mengharuskan pembelajaran dari rumah. Pengabdian masyarakat ini dilakukan di aula dan laboratorium komputer SMK Pancasila Tambolaka Sumba Barat Daya. Pengabdian ini berupa pelaksanaan pelatihan dan pendampingan pemanfaatan media online learning free google classroom dan gmeet. Pengabdian ini dihadiri oleh 28 peserta yang merupakan guru di SMK Negeri 1 Pancasila dan beberapa sekolah lainnya di Sumba Barat. Materi yang diberikan diantaranya Sosialisasi Pembelajaran, Penggunaan Google Classroom, Penggunaan Google Form, Penggunaan Google Meet, Semua Mapel dalam 1 Classroom dan Simulasi. Berdasarkan hasil evaluasi dari pelaksanaan pengabdian pada masyakat dengan pelatihan dan diskusi yang dilakukan selama 5 hari dapat diperoleh (1) media online learning free google classroom dan gmeet dapat digunakan oleh guru-guru, (2) alternatif solusi dalam menghadapi pembebelajaran yang mendadak online salam pandemi covid-19 (3) guruguru telah berhasil menggunakan fitur-fitur pada media online learning free google classroom, google form dan gmeet. Berdasarkan dari hasil evaluasi dapat disimpulkan bahwa pengabdian pada masyarakat ini telah berhasil dilakukan dengan baik.

The P300 event related potential (ERP) has been cited as a marker of phonological working memory (PWM); however, little is known regarding its relationship to behavioral PWM skills in early school-aged children. The current study investigates the P300 ERP recorded in response to native and non-native (English and Spanish) phoneme contrasts as a predictor of PWM skills in monolingual English-speaking first and second grade children. Thirty-three typically developing children, ages 6–9, completed a battery of phonological processing, language, and cognitive assessments. ERPs were recorded within an auditory oddball paradigm in response to both English phoneme contrasts (/ta/, /pa/) and Spanish contrasts (/t̪a/, /d̪a/). The P300 ERP recorded in response to English phoneme contrasts significantly predicted standard scores on the Nonword Repetition subtest of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, Second Edition. Spanish contrasts did not elicit a P300 response, nor were ampl...

Audiovisual speech perception includes the simultaneous processing of auditory and visual speech. Deficits in audiovisual speech perception are reported in autistic individuals; however, less is known regarding audiovisual speech perception within the broader autism phenotype (BAP), which includes individuals with elevated, yet subclinical, levels of autistic traits. We investigate the neural indices of audiovisual speech perception in adults exhibiting a range of autism-like traits using event-related potentials (ERPs) in a phonemic restoration paradigm. In this paradigm, we consider conditions where speech articulators (mouth and jaw) are present (AV condition) and obscured by a pixelated mask (PX condition). These two face conditions were included in both passive (simply viewing a speaking face) and active (participants were required to press a button for a specific consonant–vowel stimulus) experiments. The results revealed an N100 ERP component which was present for all listeni...