Category Generation Performance of Bilingual Children with Typical Development and Language Impairment

All material Copyright © 2007 Bilinguistics
Reprinted with the express permission of Bilinguistics as originally published on their website.

By: Bilinguistics Inc.


This is a Continuing Education Course offered by Bilinguistics, an ASHA Approved CE Provider. To take the test and receive Continuing Education Units for this course, please visit the Bilinguistics website test page for this course HERE

• Content Area: Professional
• Instructional Level: Advanced
• Continuing Education Units: .1 (1 hour)
  

Objectives:
Participants will be able to demonstrate knowledge in and identify:

• Generation of categories and item names by bilingual children
• The number and types of items generated by bilingual children
• The types of errors typically made by bilingual children
• The types of categorization strategies typically used by bilingual children.
• The different patterns of item generation between typically developing and languageimpaired
  groups
  

Introduction
Categorization refers to the vocabulary that is produced by children when they are asked to name items related to a theme (e.g. animals). These items can be requested in broad terms (e.g. name all) or discrete terms (e.g. name all farm animals). This information can be helpful in describing how a child learns and the semantic knowledge that they have (Nelson & Nelson, 1990). Research suggests that young typically developing bilingual children exhibit stronger categorization skills earlier than typically developing monolingual children (Peña, Bedore, & Zlatic-Giunta, 2002; Nelson & Nelson, 1990; Yu & Nelson, 1993). This suggests that bilingualism can influence the number of words that a child can generate when asked to talk about a subject. However, little is known about the category generation ability of language-impaired or older typically developing bilingual children. This paper aims to explore the differences in the vocabulary that is produced by bilingual children with language impairment (LI) and bilingual children with typical development (TD). Differences are identified by examining the effects of the particular category (e.g. animals), the condition (broad or discrete), and the language (English or Spanish) used on the number and type of items generated, types of errors made, and strategies used.

Read the Entire Paper

This is a Continuing Education Course offered by Bilinguistics, an ASHA Approved CE Provider. To take the test and receive Continuing Education Units for this course, please visit the Bilinguistics website test page for this course HERE



Featured Organization: Bilinguistics

We thank Bilinguistics for allowing us to reprint their copyrighted article. Please support our contributing authors.

The mission at Bilinguistics is "to enhance the communication of Spanish-English bilingual children, enabling those children to achieve their highest communicative and academic potential. Additionally to support monolingual and bilingual professionals working with bilingual children and English language learners through workshops, presentations, and continuing education."

For more information about this organization please visit Bilinguistics