Syntactic performance of bilingual children ages 7 ; 0-9 ; 0

To date, very little is known about the syntactic development of school-age bilingual Spanish-English speaking children. There are currently no standardized tests that have been designed to assess bilingual (English/Spanish) language development in children ages 7-9 years. The Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA; Peña, Gutierrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, in development) was designed to identify language impairment in bilingual children ages 4-6 years. For the first study, an upward extension of this assessment was created to assess the syntactic skills of 7-9 year old bilingual children. This upward extension includes items retained from the syntactic portion of the BESA, as well as newly created test items that were chosen based on children's test performance and current literature on clinical markers for bilingual children with language impairment. The second study looks at the syntactic skills of 2 typically developing bilingual (English/Spanish) children ages 7;0 and 9;4 using the upward extension of the BESA. The participants were unable to complete the Spanish tasks. However, their English performance indicated that these children performed at or near ceiling for nearly all test items. Most of the test items appeared to be relatively easy for these typically developing children. Based on the children's performance, some test items will need to be evaluated further before being included in the final test battery.