Cognitive Skills in Children with DLD

We have finished recruiting participants on this project! Nearly 300 children, aged 5-7 years, have completed all project tasks and meet all criteria to be included in our study. Around 125 children speak only English, around 125 speak both Spanish and English, and nearly 50 speak both Vietnamese and English.

Participating children have completed 6 different cognitive tasks, and we have analyzed the cognitive profiles that are demonstrated by our participants. We are interested in whether some children show relative strengths in some skills (like a strength in memory compared to a weakness in attention) or in one modality (like a strength in processing visual information comparied to auditory).

We have developed open-access versions of our cognitive tasks, so that professionals outside the research community can use them. These task versions have been created in Python, a free programming language. At the 2024 Minnesota State Fair, we recruited over 100 children to find out whether our new (free) tasks perform the same way our existing tasks do.

We have conducted two different discussion sessions with speech-language pathologists about incorporating processing-based tasks, like the ones in this study, into language assessment with bilingual children. We discussed real-world barriers that might prevent people from using these tasks, and possible ways to address these barriers.

Our tasks are less-biased for children who speak languages in addition to English. Children who speak both Spanish and English perform similarly to children who speak only English on the tasks. Also, the amount of exposure to Spanish they have does not seem to matter, and children who speak Spanish perform similarly to those who speak Vietnamese. This is important because the amount of exposure a child has to a language other than English does impact their performance on the tasks we usually use for language assessments.

Our cognitive tasks are reliable, which means that each task is consistent in what it measures. We have shown that each task gives similar scores when a child completes it on two different days. We have also shown that each task measures one skill consistently throughout the whole task. Showing our tasks are reliable is an important step, because unreliable tasks are not good assessments.

Our open-access task versions give very similar results to our original tasks. This will facilitate our ability to provide accessible tasks to practitioners.

We learned that many of the perceived barriers to using cognitive tasks in language assessment relate to the need for clear interpretation guidelines, and for training in how to administer and interpret these types of tasks.

We need to see if our tasks can help determine which children have DLD.

We are planning next steps after we wrap up this project. We are particularly interested in how these tasks might be integrated into practice.