Development of a Language Impairment Screener for Spanish Speaking Children--SSLIC: Phase 1--Task Development

The main purpose of this study is to develop a Spanish language screening measure that (a) is valid and reliable for the purpose of identifying Spanish-speaking (SS) children at risk for Language Impairment (LI), (b) is valid and reliable across different Spanish dialects, different socioeconomic groups, and different ethnicities, (c) uses a Spanish LI model rather than an English language model, and (d) is easy to administer and score by paraprofessionals in schools in the United States (U.S.). The screening measure is intended as a universal screening instrument in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten and as a screening tool for speech-language pathologists in first through second grade students referred by teachers, physicians, other professionals, or parents. Early and accurate identification of LI risk will lead to timely evaluation, identification and treatment of LI. This will result in increased academic success by ELLs (English Language Learners) that will positively impact academic achievement in U.S. schools. For this presentation the authors report on outcomes from the first development phase of the research. This research phase focuses on developing items in three tasks: (a) rapid automatized naming, (b) sentence repetition, and (c) a morphological cloze task. In summary, the three tasks designed to differentiate groups are working as hypothesized, leading to significant differences between TD (typical development) and LI groups. Further, specific items in each task are also differentiating the groups, and the selection for the best six items reflect large effect sizes in each subtask. Of the three tasks, morphological subtests for clitics and prepositions in kindergarten and preposition and articles in first grade show the greatest potential, along with sentence repetition. (Contains 2 figures.)