Austin, L., Iglesias, A., & Rojas, R.  (in preparation).  Spanish verb morphology and use in monolingual and bilingual children’s narratives.

In 2010 I applied for and received a Cullen Grant to support summer research spent in analyzing the Spanish language narrative transcripts of 120 children; 60 monolingual and 60 bilingual.  These transcripts were obtained through contact with Dr. Aquiles Iglesias, of Temple University, one of the primary investigators and developers of the SALT software (Spanish language version) which is used for analysis of language samples .  The purpose of the research is to investigate differences between the Spanish verb morphologies of bilingual and monolingual children in narrative language contexts.

This opportunity has resulted in a project as or more challenging to me personally than my dissertation.  While I have been able to involve a research assistant to help me, I have usually been working alone, problem-solving independently and above my level of research competence.  The learning has been rich, and the learning curve steep.  I had to locate some assistance with some statistical issues in the data in late 2012 (from Dr. Mark Riggs, Math Department), but I felt at the beginning of 2013 that the project was near to completion.  However, in spring 2013 I ran across some very recent literature that required me to complete additional analyses on all of the transcripts.  Those are nearly finished.

Here are the steps that I have completed in carrying out this project:

1) Reviewed 60+ references in the fields of CSD, linguistics, and sociology

2) carried out three separate analyses of the transcripts; one analyzing verb forms, one identifying verb conjugation and usage errors, and one breaking down error types

3) Run statistical analyses to identify group differences:  there are some specific to language status (bilingual vs. monolingual)

4) After comprehensive review of the literature, seated the study within the framework of the intersection of bilingualism and language impairment, utilizing Dynamic Systems Theory as an explanatory factor, with specific reference to event conceptualization.

5)  Suggested, within the framework identified in #4, that the field of CSD abandon the “deficit perspective” that it seems to utilize in analyzing and describing the L1 language skills of bilingual children and instead begin to focus on “bilingual language adaptation” (terminology not used previously to reference this phenomenon, as far as I have been able to determine).

I have entered again in communication this fall with Dr. Iglesias and his colleague, Dr. Rojas, and anticipate that one or both will partner with me to complete this work.  But whether or not that comes to pass I intend to complete the work and submit it to Communication Disorders Quarterly for review.  At this point I am less blithe about predicting dates for completion, but I will steadily move forward.

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