UC San Diego

There are approximately 5 million school-aged bilinguals in the United States, and 75% of these bilinguals speak Spanish at home (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021). Despite this prevalence, there is a lack of language assessment tools for children who speak more than one language. Language sample analysis is a critical component of language assessment for bilingual children, as measures like grammaticality characterize children’s abilities in both languages (Castilla-Earls et al., 2021; Bedore et al., 2010). Another promising language assessment tool is grammatical productivity, which assesses children’s breadth and depth of grammatical structures during language sampling to derive a productivity score (Hadley & Short, 2005). This measure has been shown to differentiate typically developing English-speaking monolingual children from their peers with DLD (Gladfelter & Leonard, 2013). The limited research available on productivity in Spanish-English bilingual children has shown that the productivity of English grammatical structures yield group differences between typically developing peers and those with low language abilities (Potapova et al., 2018). However, children’s grammatical productivity has not yet been examined in Spanish, and this is necessary to fully characterize Spanish-English bilingual children’s language ability. This dissertation investigates both linguistically and culturally responsive tools to contribute to evidence-based language assessment for young Spanish-English bilingual children and to ultimately help reduce health and educational disparities for this population.