Bilingual children are often misdiagnosed - Language Disorders

A language difference is not a language disorder. Still, every year, some bilingual children wind up being funneled into classrooms designed for children with learning disabilities. Elizabeth Pena, an assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin's Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, is working to develop better ways to assess language skills in bilingual children to prevent misdiagnosis and make sure that those with genuine learning problems get the help they need.

"If you look at the expected incidence of language impairment, minority children generally are overidentified or underidentified," Pena explains. "Not speaking English well can be interpreted as not having the ability to learn language well. If these kids end up getting placed in special education, expectations tend to go down. They are not getting an education that is consistent with their real abilities."

There also is a serious cost to a child with a genuine learning problem that does not get diagnosed early enough. "If children do not get identified, we have lost some critical time where they could have been getting services. By the third or fourth grade, they might be so far behind they don't have a chance. We are trying to come up with a measure that is better at classifying bilingual children with language problems and those without language problems."

Pena and Lisa Bedore, assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders, are collaborating with researchers in California and Pennsylvania to develop a language test for bilingual children four, five, and six years of age that will measure four important aspects of the youngster's use of language: vocabulary, grammar, the sounds of words, and the way kids communicate in interactions with others.

About seven percent of all school-age children throughout the U.S. have unusual difficulty learning and using language, and they struggle with reading, writing, and math. Researchers say these children frequently misunderstand what is said to them. They have very limited vocabularies; use short, grammatically incorrect sentences; frequently ask for information to be repeated; and appear reluctant to join conversations.

An educator unfamiliar with Spanish may easily be misled by a bilingual child's struggles with English. In general, though, the mistakes committed by a normal child will be consistent, related to the differences in the two languages. For example, adjectives such as "big" come before nouns like "river" in English. Yet, the reverse--"Rio Grande"--is true in Spanish. Nailing down these consistencies in language use is one of the goals of the researchers, so speech language pathologists who diagnose language learning problems will know for sure what is appropriate for the native language and the new one.

Educators usually determine whether preschool and elementary students have language learning impairments using traditional tests that check whether a sufficient number of correct answers are given. The tests rarely are in both languages and seldom give a complete picture of the child's abilities. Researchers say it is crucial to test bilingual youngsters in both languages because, for example, Spanish-speaking children may have learned the words for colors or numbers in English watching "Sesame Street," but they use Spanish words for family members.

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