Projects

Johanne Catherine Paradis
Associate Professor,
Department of Linguistics,
4-46 Assiniboia Hall, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada, T6G 2E7
1 (780) 492-0805
E-mail: johanne.paradis@ualberta.ca

Project Summaries back to main page

Oral Language Characteristics of ESL Children:
Developing Resources for Language Assessment in a Multilingual Context

PURPOSE
Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) are increasingly finding children whose first language is not English in their caseloads, and yet the assessment protocols they were trained to use were developed for monolingual populations. Children aged 0-9 whose mother tongue is neither English nor French number 432,655, approximately 12.5% of all Canadian children in this age range. The over- and under-identification of language impairment in children who are learning English as a second language (ESL) is a documented risk factor, and occurs because (1) there is an absence of appropriate assessment tools available for this population, and (2) there is overlap in the linguistic characteristics between the incompletely-learned English of typically-developing (TD) ESL children and that of monolingual English-speaking children with language impairment. To reduce the incidence of over- and under-identification, SLPs need more detailed information about the characteristics of typical and atypical ESL development, and access to assessment resources based on the linguistic performance of ESL children. The objective of this research is to provide both SLPs and the academic community with such information and resources.

METHOD
The research questions for this program are as follows: (1) What are the linguistic characteristics that distinguish TD ESL children from monolinguals with (specific) language impairment (SLI) and ESL children at risk for SLI? (2) How can ESL children be expected to perform on English standardized tests normed with monolinguals the same age? (3) Does ESL children’s performance compared with monolingual age-mates differ depending on the linguistic skill being measured? (4) What standardized and non-standardized measures might be effective for identification of SLI in ESL children? (5) How might ESL children’s performance on language measures change as a function of age of onset of English, exposure time to English, first language background, and other variables such as parental levels of education or amount of English spoken in the home? 300 TD ESL children and 50 ESL children at risk for SLI, ranging in age from 5;0-6;11 and in exposure to English from 1-3 years, will be recruited by the end of the study. Children’s first languages are Spanish/Portuguese, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese), Punjabi/Hindi/Urdu, or Arabic. Data collection includes a detailed parental questionnaire about children's language history, spontaneous speech sampling, as well as English standardized tests designed to measure phonological working memory skills, vocabulary accumulated in English, accuracy with verbs (grammar) and narrative skills. Question (1) will be addressed through fine-grained linguistic comparisons between the TD and at-risk groups, as well as with extant data from monolinguals. Questions (2) and (3) will be addressed through analyzing the TD children's data as benchmarked to monolingual age-mates, and comparing across measures. Question (4) will be addressed through comparisons of the performance of the TD and at-risk-for SLI children on the measures, using techniques like linear discriminant function analysis. Question (5) will be addressed through additional analyses of the children's data for the impact of these predictor variables.

OUTCOMES AND SIGNIFICANCE
The practical outcome will be a web-accessible Child ESL (CHESL) Resource Centre designed to be relevant for assessment of children in a multilingual context. No other resource centre of this kind presently exists. The CHESL Resource Centre will include the following: (i) Age- and exposure-to-English-based ESL norms for the formal and informal language measures gathered; (ii) Summary information on ESL children’s profiles across language skills, and the impact of sources of individual differences on their performance, among other results of the other analyses; (iii) Summary information of analyses conducted with the at-risk-for-SLI group in particular, with interpretations pertinent for assessment purposes; (iv) Detailed instructions on how to use and score the parental questionnaires and to obtain and analyze the spontaneous language samples; (v) Reviews of research on child second language acquisition and child bilingualism and the issues and implications for assessment and intervention, written for an educated non-academic audience; (vi) Links for other websites on similar topics, as well as to websites with relevant educational and policy information from ASHA, CASLPA, and their sister organizations in the UK, Ireland, and Australia; (vii) Recommended readings for non-academics and a key-word searchable bibliography of published work on child bilingualism, which will be up-dated annually. The knowledge-based outcomes will consist of scholarly publications aimed at academics in the fields of second language acquisition and communication disorders, workshops and seminars given to practitioners, and additional information to be posted on the website. The outcomes of this research could influence both practice and policy regarding the identification of language impairment in ESL children.

Publications associated with this research programme

Paradis, J., Emmerzael, K., & Sorenson Duncan, T. (in press). Assessment of English Language
Learners: Using Parent Report on First Language Development. Journal of Communication Disorders.

Paradis, J., Rice, M., Crago, M., Marquis, J. (2008). The acquisition of tense in English: Distinguishing child L2 from L1 and SLI. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 1-34.

Paradis, J. (2008). Tense as a clinical marker in English L2 acquisition with language delay/impairment. In E. Gavruseva & B. Haznedar (Eds.), Current Trends in Child Second Language Acquisition: A Generative Perspective (pp. 337-356). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Golberg, H., Paradis, J., & Crago, M. (2008). Lexical acquisition over time in minority L1 children learning English as a L2. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 1-25.

Paradis, J. (2005). Grammatical morphology in children learning English as a second language: Implications of similarities with Specific Language Impairment. Language, Speech and Hearing Services in the Schools, 36, 172-187.

The Role of Input in Language Acquisition: Evidence from French-English Bilingual Children

PURPOSE

A fundamental debate in language acquisition theory concerns the role of input in determining developmental outcomes. This debate goes to the heart of the division between nativist, Universal Grammar-based approaches and non-nativist, Constructivist/Usage-based approaches. Children who acquire two languages simultaneously from birth have relatively less exposure to each of their languages than same-aged monolinguals, and this exposure is seldom equally balanced between their languages. Furthermore, bilingual children in a French minority context may experience even more diversity in their French input than bilinguals in the majority context of Québec. The special properties of the dual language experience make bilingual children a unique and pivotal population for testing opposing perspectives on input variation and acquisition. The acquisition of the past tense (simple past: I walk- I walked/passé composé: je marche-j’ai marché) has been the focus of intense theoretical debate in which the role of input frequency is centrally implicated. Examining past tense acquisition by French-English monolinguals and bilinguals, therefore, will yield data addressing both local and broader debates concerning input factors in language acquisition. Furthermore, examining morphosyntactic achievements in French-English bilingual preschoolers, in the minority context in particular, will also fulfill a broader societal need for information regarding the implications of bilingual developmental outcomes for educational program and language assessment decisions.

METHOD

(1) How do bilinguals compare to monolinguals in their acquisition of the past tense? Do bilinguals lag behind monolinguals? If yes, in both languages or only in the language for which they receive less input? Are there differences in the acquisition of the passé composé for bilinguals in a French minority versus majority context? (2) What are the differences in distribution and frequency of the past tense in the input, for English versus French, monolingual versus bilingual exposure, and French minority versus majority contexts? Can these input differences explain differences in children’s use of the past tense?

<>Both experimental and corpus-based research are being employed to address our research questions. Elicitation tasks with known and nonce verbs in the past tense are being conducted with bilinguals (French-dominant, English-dominant, minority context (Alberta) and majority context (Québec)) and monolinguals in French and English. Results of these studies will address primarily research questions in group (1). The corpus-based studies will consist of tagging and analyzing existing spontaneous speech transcripts totaling hundreds of hours of French-English bilingual and monolingual adult-to-child and child-to-adult speech. The results of these studies will primarily address research questions in group (2).

OUTCOMES AND SIGNIFICANCE

We anticipate this program to yield conference presentations followed by journal articles co-authored between applicants and students and aimed at addressing this leading debate in the field. The original research contributions will be: (a) comparisons across the French minority-majority Canadian contexts, (b) bilingual-monolingual comparisons for a theoretically important morphosyntactic construction, the past tense, and (c) systematic, in-depth examination of the relationship between input and children’s output for bilingual populations.

Publications associated with this research programme

Paradis, J. (in press). Bilingual children’s acquisition of English verb morphology: Effects of language dominance, structure difficulty, and task type. Language Learning. (Available upon request to author)

Paradis, J. (2009). Oral language development in French and English and the role of home input factors. Report for the Conseil Scolarie Centre-Nord, Edmonton, Alberta.

Paradis, J. (2007). Bilingual children with specific language impairment: Theoretical and applied issues. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 512-564.

Paradis, J., Nicoladis, E., & Crago, M. (2007). French-English bilingual children's acquisition of the past tense. Boston University Conference on Language Development 31 Proceedings. Somervile, MA: Cascadilla Press.

		Johanne Catherine Paradis Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, 4-46 Assiniboia Hall, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada, T6G 2E7 1 (780) 492-0805 E-mail: johanne.paradis@ualberta.ca
	Project Summaries back to main page Oral Language Characteristics of ESL Children: Developing Resources for Language Assessment in a Multilingual Context PURPOSE Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) are increasingly finding children whose first language is not English in their caseloads, and yet the assessment protocols they were trained to use were developed for monolingual populations. Children aged 0-9 whose mother tongue is neither English nor French number 432,655, approximately 12.5% of all Canadian children in this age range. The over- and under-identification of language impairment in children who are learning English as a second language (ESL) is a documented risk factor, and occurs because (1) there is an absence of appropriate assessment tools available for this population, and (2) there is overlap in the linguistic characteristics between the incompletely-learned English of typically-developing (TD) ESL children and that of monolingual English-speaking children with language impairment. To reduce the incidence of over- and under-identification, SLPs need more detailed information about the characteristics of typical and atypical ESL development, and access to assessment resources based on the linguistic performance of ESL children. The objective of this research is to provide both SLPs and the academic community with such information and resources. METHOD The research questions for this program are as follows: (1) What are the linguistic characteristics that distinguish TD ESL children from monolinguals with (specific) language impairment (SLI) and ESL children at risk for SLI? (2) How can ESL children be expected to perform on English standardized tests normed with monolinguals the same age? (3) Does ESL children’s performance compared with monolingual age-mates differ depending on the linguistic skill being measured? (4) What standardized and non-standardized measures might be effective for identification of SLI in ESL children? (5) How might ESL children’s performance on language measures change as a function of age of onset of English, exposure time to English, first language background, and other variables such as parental levels of education or amount of English spoken in the home? 300 TD ESL children and 50 ESL children at risk for SLI, ranging in age from 5;0-6;11 and in exposure to English from 1-3 years, will be recruited by the end of the study. Children’s first languages are Spanish/Portuguese, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese), Punjabi/Hindi/Urdu, or Arabic. Data collection includes a detailed parental questionnaire about children's language history, spontaneous speech sampling, as well as English standardized tests designed to measure phonological working memory skills, vocabulary accumulated in English, accuracy with verbs (grammar) and narrative skills. Question (1) will be addressed through fine-grained linguistic comparisons between the TD and at-risk groups, as well as with extant data from monolinguals. Questions (2) and (3) will be addressed through analyzing the TD children's data as benchmarked to monolingual age-mates, and comparing across measures. Question (4) will be addressed through comparisons of the performance of the TD and at-risk-for SLI children on the measures, using techniques like linear discriminant function analysis. Question (5) will be addressed through additional analyses of the children's data for the impact of these predictor variables. OUTCOMES AND SIGNIFICANCE The practical outcome will be a web-accessible Child ESL (CHESL) Resource Centre designed to be relevant for assessment of children in a multilingual context. No other resource centre of this kind presently exists. The CHESL Resource Centre will include the following: (i) Age- and exposure-to-English-based ESL norms for the formal and informal language measures gathered; (ii) Summary information on ESL children’s profiles across language skills, and the impact of sources of individual differences on their performance, among other results of the other analyses; (iii) Summary information of analyses conducted with the at-risk-for-SLI group in particular, with interpretations pertinent for assessment purposes; (iv) Detailed instructions on how to use and score the parental questionnaires and to obtain and analyze the spontaneous language samples; (v) Reviews of research on child second language acquisition and child bilingualism and the issues and implications for assessment and intervention, written for an educated non-academic audience; (vi) Links for other websites on similar topics, as well as to websites with relevant educational and policy information from ASHA, CASLPA, and their sister organizations in the UK, Ireland, and Australia; (vii) Recommended readings for non-academics and a key-word searchable bibliography of published work on child bilingualism, which will be up-dated annually. The knowledge-based outcomes will consist of scholarly publications aimed at academics in the fields of second language acquisition and communication disorders, workshops and seminars given to practitioners, and additional information to be posted on the website. The outcomes of this research could influence both practice and policy regarding the identification of language impairment in ESL children. Publications associated with this research programme Paradis, J., Emmerzael, K., & Sorenson Duncan, T. (in press). Assessment of English Language Learners: Using Parent Report on First Language Development. Journal of Communication Disorders. Paradis, J., Rice, M., Crago, M., Marquis, J. (2008). The acquisition of tense in English: Distinguishing child L2 from L1 and SLI. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 1-34. Paradis, J. (2008). Tense as a clinical marker in English L2 acquisition with language delay/impairment. In E. Gavruseva & B. Haznedar (Eds.), Current Trends in Child Second Language Acquisition: A Generative Perspective (pp. 337-356). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Golberg, H., Paradis, J., & Crago, M. (2008). Lexical acquisition over time in minority L1 children learning English as a L2. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 1-25. Paradis, J. (2005). Grammatical morphology in children learning English as a second language: Implications of similarities with Specific Language Impairment. Language, Speech and Hearing Services in the Schools, 36, 172-187. The Role of Input in Language Acquisition: Evidence from French-English Bilingual Children PURPOSE A fundamental debate in language acquisition theory concerns the role of input in determining developmental outcomes. This debate goes to the heart of the division between nativist, Universal Grammar-based approaches and non-nativist, Constructivist/Usage-based approaches. Children who acquire two languages simultaneously from birth have relatively less exposure to each of their languages than same-aged monolinguals, and this exposure is seldom equally balanced between their languages. Furthermore, bilingual children in a French minority context may experience even more diversity in their French input than bilinguals in the majority context of Québec. The special properties of the dual language experience make bilingual children a unique and pivotal population for testing opposing perspectives on input variation and acquisition. The acquisition of the past tense (simple past: I walk- I walked/passé composé: je marche-j’ai marché) has been the focus of intense theoretical debate in which the role of input frequency is centrally implicated. Examining past tense acquisition by French-English monolinguals and bilinguals, therefore, will yield data addressing both local and broader debates concerning input factors in language acquisition. Furthermore, examining morphosyntactic achievements in French-English bilingual preschoolers, in the minority context in particular, will also fulfill a broader societal need for information regarding the implications of bilingual developmental outcomes for educational program and language assessment decisions. METHOD (1) How do bilinguals compare to monolinguals in their acquisition of the past tense? Do bilinguals lag behind monolinguals? If yes, in both languages or only in the language for which they receive less input? Are there differences in the acquisition of the passé composé for bilinguals in a French minority versus majority context? (2) What are the differences in distribution and frequency of the past tense in the input, for English versus French, monolingual versus bilingual exposure, and French minority versus majority contexts? Can these input differences explain differences in children’s use of the past tense? <>Both experimental and corpus-based research are being employed to address our research questions. Elicitation tasks with known and nonce verbs in the past tense are being conducted with bilinguals (French-dominant, English-dominant, minority context (Alberta) and majority context (Québec)) and monolinguals in French and English. Results of these studies will address primarily research questions in group (1). The corpus-based studies will consist of tagging and analyzing existing spontaneous speech transcripts totaling hundreds of hours of French-English bilingual and monolingual adult-to-child and child-to-adult speech. The results of these studies will primarily address research questions in group (2). OUTCOMES AND SIGNIFICANCE We anticipate this program to yield conference presentations followed by journal articles co-authored between applicants and students and aimed at addressing this leading debate in the field. The original research contributions will be: (a) comparisons across the French minority-majority Canadian contexts, (b) bilingual-monolingual comparisons for a theoretically important morphosyntactic construction, the past tense, and (c) systematic, in-depth examination of the relationship between input and children’s output for bilingual populations. Publications associated with this research programme Paradis, J. (in press). Bilingual children’s acquisition of English verb morphology: Effects of language dominance, structure difficulty, and task type. Language Learning. (Available upon request to author) Paradis, J. (2009). Oral language development in French and English and the role of home input factors. Report for the Conseil Scolarie Centre-Nord, Edmonton, Alberta. Paradis, J. (2007). Bilingual children with specific language impairment: Theoretical and applied issues. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 512-564. Paradis, J., Nicoladis, E., & Crago, M. (2007). French-English bilingual children's acquisition of the past tense. Boston University Conference on Language Development 31 Proceedings. Somervile, MA: Cascadilla Press.