Research Projects

Speech Screener for Bilingual Spanish-English Children

What is a screener? A screener is a quick assessment that helps decide which children may have problems with their speech and need a longer evaluation

Currently, there are few, if any, standardized Spanish-English bilingual screeners. To design our pilot screener, we used the data and results from our large-scale bilingual development study to develop target words and preliminary cutoff scores. With the extensive support of PSU’s Claudia Meyer and graduate students in our bilingual concentration, we first collected pilot data to refine and finalize our target words and methodology. We have collected speech samples from bilingual Spanish-English and monolingual Spanish speakers in preschool and kindergarten classrooms throughout the Portland metropolitan region. We administered this 5-minute screener to over 400 Spanish-English bilingual children who are 3 to 7 years of age. The goal is to validate preliminary cutoff scores through a full speech assessment of a subgroup of these children.

We have also administered a parent background questionnaire to validate the correlation between the question responses and the screener results.

From Bilingual and Cross-Linguistic Perspectives

This primary research explores how speech develops in typical children from bilingual Spanish-English backgrounds, and to a lesser extent, Russian-English backgrounds. This research addresses several areas of need in the field of communication disorders by significantly expanding the knowledge base for researchers, clinicians, educators, and families. It also establishes a typical development framework from which to compare research on bilingual speech sound disorders.

Treatment Efficacy in Childhood Apraxia of Speech

Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) is a speech sound disorder characterized by motor planning and programming difficulties.

Our research area evaluates treatment efficacy for childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), an impairment in the motor planning necessary for accurate speech production. One such way this has been explored is through the examination of production frequency to monitor learning and to determine whether more practice of speech targets leads to increased performance within a treatment session.

Additionally, The Functional Communication Parent Questionnaire (see under Speech Sound Disorder section) guides treatment target selection for children with moderate-to-severe speech sound disorders, including those with CAS. Available in English and Spanish, the questionnaire’s creation was based largely on evidence from the augmentative and alternative communication literature and suggestions from the World Health Organization.

Speech Sound Disorders in Bilingual Spanish-English Children

This research explores characteristics of bilingual speech sound disorder and best practices for assessment and treatment of these disorders in bilingual children. Which treatment methods are best for these children and for other children from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds?