Det finns många små barn vars föräldrar ursprungligen kommer från andra kulturer, och de har uppfostrats annorlunda än den nya kulturen. De flesta tidigare forskningarna visa att utländska föräldrar står inför flera utmaningar i uppfostrans process som att behålla sin identitet, modersmål och normer. Studiens syfte är att undersöka hur irakiska småbarnsföräldrar uppfostrar sina barn i Sverige. Forskningsmetoden är hermeneutisk där 10 föräldrar, varv fem mammor med barn i åldrarna 2–8 i en intervju, delade med sig av sina upplevelser och erfarenheter. Med hjälp av en tematisk analys identifieras fem teman som en förändrad syn på uppfostran: barn i centrum, en annorlunda familjekonstellation, genusbaserade normer i uppfostran, en diskrepans mellan föräldrars skyldigheter och barnens rättigheter och önskan att behålla föräldrarnas värderingar. Studiens resultat visar att det är en utmaning att uppfostra barn i en ny kultur, därför bör föräldrarna ta hänsyn till de kulturella skillnaderna för att undvika kulturkrock.

The study investigates prediction factors of children's proficiency in Russian among children from Russian-speaking families in Saskatchewan. For that purpose, 5-7 year old children and their parents were interviewed about their language use, proficiency, and language attitudes, as well as children's Russian language proficiency was measured and compared to monolingual children in Russia.

Within the current decade, the number of Hispanic students has doubled so that about 16% of the total student population within the United States are Spanish-speakers (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017). With this growing population comes a responsibility to understand and implement best practices for educating these students. Because literacy is a building-block for learning, one integral part of this responsibility consists of developing valid and reliable means of assessing pre-reading skills that are predictive of later reading abilities (Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony, 2000; Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1994). English-language learning children are being identified for having reading difficulties and disabilities two to three years later than their English-proficient peers (Chu & Flores, 2011). As a population, they are also overly misidentified as having reading difficulties/disabilities and being unnecessarily placed into a special education system (McCardle, Mele-McCarthy, Cutting, Leos, & D’Emilio, 2005b; Sanatullova Allison & Robinson-Young, 2016). Per a nationwide survey of Speech-Language Pathologists, one large contributing factor for this dilemma is the lack of appropriate assessment instruments (Roseberry-McKibbin, Brice, & O’Hanlon, 2005). Phonological awareness is the ability to focus on and manipulate units of spoken language (words, syllables, onsets, rimes, and/or phonemes). It is one of the most significant predictors of later reading abilities. A large body of evidence provides support for this within the English language but also within other alphabetic languages, such as Spanish (e.g. Carillo, 1994; Durgunoglu, Nagy, Hancin-Bhatt, 1993; Schneider, Kuspert, Roth, Vise, & Marx, 1997). Thus, assessments of phonological awareness have been shown to be reliable measures that predict later reading abilities in Spanish-speaking children and English-proficient children alike (Farver, Nakamoto, & Lonigan, 2007). There are many standardized assessments available to test phonological awareness as an emergent literacy skill in English. In congruence with the previously mentioned nationwide survey, Spanish assessments of phonological awareness are less abundant. Additionally, these tests tend to be expensive, time-consuming to give, and require training of the administrator. These tests are static in nature and regularly require the child to comprehend complex administrative instructions which is often problematic for children with limited language skills in Spanish and/or English (Barker, Bridges, & Saunders, 2014). The current study aims to build upon existing data regarding development of the DAPA-S by evaluating the validity of a shorter version of the DAPA-S (the DAPA-S Short Form) with children from Spanish-speaking backgrounds. The DAPA-S Short form was designed with the purpose of retaining all the test items of the full version but with an altered structure which allows for significantly shorter administration time. The DAPA-S and the shorter version were both designed as Spanish dynamic assessments of phonological awareness which are computerized, have simple instructions, provide information about a child’s ability to learn from instruction, and do not require speech responses. The twelve participants that were involved in this study were given the DAPA-S Short Form as well as other assessments related to phonological awareness or emergent reading. Three of those participants did not complete the study due to poor attendance or behavioral challenges. Therefore, this study reports on nine participants who completed the full assessment battery. To investigate concurrent validity, correlational analysis was performed with the DAPA-S Short Form scores and scores from a measure of phonological awareness, the Test of Phonological Sensitivity in Spanish (TOPSS; Brea, Silliman, Bahr, & Bryant, 2003). The Elision, Rapid Automatic Naming, and Letter Name/ Letter Sound subtests from the TOPSS were administered. No significant correlations were observed between either subtest from the DAPA-S Short Form and any of the subtests from the TOPSS (r = .49 for Elision, r = .36 for RAN, r = .43 for Letter Name/Letter Sound subtests). Therefore, concurrent validity was not established as measured in this study. To investigate convergent validity, correlational analysis was performed with the DAPA-S Short Form subtests and the scores from a measure of Spanish emergent reading skills, the Letter-word Identification (LWID) subtest from the Woodcock-Muñoz Language Survey – Revised (WMLS-R; Woodcock, Muñoz – Sandoval, Ruef, & Alvarado, 2005). Significant correlation was observed between the First Syllable subtest of the DAPA-S Short Form and the test of emergent literacy (r = .87, p < .01); no significant correlation was observed for the Last Syllable subtest of the DAPA-S Short Form (r = .44) and the test of emergent literacy. Therefore, the First Syllable subtest from the DAPA-S Short Form demonstrates good convergent validity, while the Last Syllable subtest did not. Data suggests that the DAPA-S Short Form demonstrates excellent internal reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = .99 for both subtests) but requires modifications and further testing with a larger sample size in order to be considered as a valid measure of phonological awareness. If developed through further research, the DAPA-S Short Form as well as the full version of the assessment could prove to be invaluable tools in educational and clinical settings.

Literacy development in Spanish-speaking children is a growing concern in the United States (Invernizzi, 2009). Phonological awareness is a predictor of literacy achievement in most alphabetic languages (Anthony et al., 2011; Davison & Brea-Spahn, 2012; Durgunoğlu, Nagy, & Hancin-Bhatt, 1993; Goikoetxea, 2005). Bilingual children with complex communication needs (CCN) demonstrate increased difficulties in speaking, reading, and writing, making learning two languages a difficult task (Toppelberg, Snow, & Tager-Flusberg, 1999). Literacy attainment in bilingual individuals who have CCN is important to improve their overall language development and communication interaction skills (Harrison-Harris, 2002). A valid and reliable phonological awareness assessment that does not require speech is needed in order to provide appropriate instruction and address desired literacy goals (Barker, Bridges, & Saunders, 2014). The goal of this study is to describe pilot data from the Dynamic Assessment of Phonemic Awareness in Spanish (DAPA-S), a new dynamic phonological awareness assessment that does not require speech responses, with children from Latin American Spanish-speaking backgrounds, in order to determine its construct validity. DAPA-S was administered over the course of one to three sessions to ten participants (six males and four females). Participants also received the Identificación de letras y palabras (Letter-Word Identification; LWID) subscale from the Woodcock-Muñoz Language Survey–Revised (WMLS-R; Woodcock, Muñoz- Sandoval, Ruef, & Alvarado, 2005) as an emergent reading skill task and three subtests from the Test of Phonological Sensitivity in Spanish (TOPSS; Brea, Silliman, Bahr, & Bryant, 2003):letter-name and letter-sound, elision, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) as assessments of phonological awareness. To evaluate concurrent validity, Pearson correlations and bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals were calculated between the DAPA-S total score and the measures of phonological awareness from the TOPSS. The DAPA-S demonstrated strong and significant correlations with elision, RAN, and the letter-sound subtests rs = –.67 to .87, ps = .00 to .03. These results indicated that the DAPA-S likely measured the same construct as the other measures of phonological awareness from the TOPSS. To evaluate convergent validity, Pearson correlations and bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals were calculated between LWID of the WMLS-R and the DAPA-S total score. The DAPA-S demonstrated a strong and significant correlation, r = .75, p < .05. The data suggest a high degree of both concurrent and convergent validity, as many of the conventional measures of phonological awareness and emergent reading were significantly correlated with the DAPA-S, including letter-sound, RAN, and LWID. Overall, the pattern of results suggests that the DAPA-S may be a reliable and valid tool for measurement of phonological awareness in Spanish.

This thesis comprised two longitudinal studies examining the role of morphological awareness in Chinese and English reading among Chinese children. In Study 1, participants were 84 kindergarten and first grade Chinese-speaking English Language Learners (ELLs) from Canada. Children’s morphological awareness, vocabulary and reading comprehension in English were assessed at two measurement points spaced one year apart. Study 2 involved the Chinese-Canadian children from Study 1, and 98 kindergarteners and first graders from China. Their morphological awareness, vocabulary and reading comprehension in Chinese were measured at the beginning of two successive academic years. Study 1 showed that for the ELLs, morphological awareness explained increasingly large proportions of variance in English vocabulary and reading comprehension with age. In Study 2, compound awareness significantly predicted Chinese vocabulary for children from both countries. Taken together, the two studies substantiated that morphological awareness contributes to reading in Chinese and English across different language-learning contexts.

This thesis comprised two longitudinal studies examining the role of morphological awareness in Chinese and English reading among Chinese children. In Study 1, participants were 84 kindergarten and first grade Chinese-speaking English Language Learners (ELLs) from Canada. Children’s morphological awareness, vocabulary and reading comprehension in English were assessed at two measurement points spaced one year apart. Study 2 involved the Chinese-Canadian children from Study 1, and 98 kindergarteners and first graders from China. Their morphological awareness, vocabulary and reading comprehension in Chinese were measured at the beginning of two successive academic years. Study 1 showed that for the ELLs, morphological awareness explained increasingly large proportions of variance in English vocabulary and reading comprehension with age. In Study 2, compound awareness significantly predicted Chinese vocabulary for children from both countries. Taken together, the two studies substantiated that morphological awareness contributes to reading in Chinese and English across different language-learning contexts.

Simultaneous bilingual and early sequential bilingual children are exposed to two languages while acquiring the sound system for the first time. In bilingual children who are identified with speech sound delay or disorder, the question arises of how to approach intervention in the most effective way. In monolingual English learning children, some strong within syllable patterns of coronal consonant and front vowel, labial consonant and central vowel, and dorsal consonant and back vowel that are based on rhythmic mandibular oscillations without independent movement of the tongue have been identified as occurring more frequently. No information is available on children learning Spanish or on children who are early bilinguals relative to the presence of these patterns in output. Consideration of the presence of these patterns, typical of early development in English learning children, would help to plan remediation more precisely for bilingual speech delayed children. If the patterns are present, they should be accounted for as basic aspects of the production system output available to young children that might need to be assessed and incorporated into early intervention protocols for bilingual children. The present study tests the hypothesis that significant similarities between performance-based, consonant-vowel (CV) co-occurrence patterns produced in Spanish and English can provide greater efficacy for assessment and intervention practices for bilingual Spanish-English children. Within syllable CV co-occurrence patterns were observed from 66 months to 81 months of age in six bilingual Spanish-English speaking children. Consonants were categorized into labial, coronal, and dorsal place of articulation while vowels were categorized by front, central, and back dimensions to evaluate co-occurrences. Predictions based on the Frame then Content (FC) theory (MacNeilage & Davis, 1990) were evaluated relative to intrasyllabic combinations of consonants and vowels. Results confirmed the prediction that CV co-occurrence patterns produced by bilingual Spanish-English speaking children share significant similarities with those produced by children in previously researched languages. These results show that the production based hypothesis of the FC theory of speech production, tested previously on English learning children is also characteristic of bilingual children learning Spanish and English. These findings suggest that consonant-vowel co-occurrence patterns are impacted by the capacity of the production system to produce different sounds in combination in diverse language learning circumstances, even when children are simultaneous bilingual learners. Mandibular oscillation without independent tongue movement within syllables is responsible for early intrasyllabic patterns produced by children. The FC theory supports the role of performance-based assessment and intervention for future practices in the field. / text

There is a documented need for appropriate language assessment measures for Spanish-English bilingual school-age children in the United States. The Bilingual English Spanish Assessment- Middle Extension (BESA-ME), the Test of Narrative Language (TNL), and the Test of Narrative Language- Spanish experimental version (Spanish TNL) were administered to 129 children ranging in age from 7;0 to 8;11. Convergence between the measures was examined. The results indicated a strong correlation between measures, as well as significant correlation between each measure and children’s ability level (i.e. classification as typically developing or with language impairment). These results present the BESA-ME and the TNL in Spanish and English as promising tools to assess language impairment in a population that traditionally has been a challenge to evaluate. / text

Over the years, scholars have gained much insight into language choice and code-switching patterns; however, the research in this area on children and second language (L2) learners has been limited with few exceptions (Fuller, 2009; Potowski, 2004, 2009; Reyes, 2001, 2004; Zentella, 1997). In particular, little research has compared simultaneous (2L1) bilingual children, those who acquired both languages before age three, and sequential (L2) bilingual children, those who learned an additional language after age three. In order to draw these beneficial comparisons, the current dissertation investigates the language choice and code-switching patterns of 2L1 and L2 bilingual children from kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade classrooms of a Spanish immersion program. The data include over 150 hours of participant observation as well as interviews with students, parents, and teachers and a core dataset of 12 hours of fully transcribed spontaneous classroom audio-recordings. The analysis of language choice patterns yields a Dynamic Model of Social Structures which offers a unique venue from which to consider how various social structures impact language choice as well as how individuals enact social identities through linguistic behaviors. The study of the communicative functions reveals that L2 and 2L1 bilingual children alike use Spanish and English for a wide variety of communicative functions. Finally, a study on the grammatical patterns and strategic discourse functions of code-switching reveals that grammatical switch-points of 2L1 and L2 bilingual code-switching are very similar and that L2 bilinguals code-switch for a variety of strategic purposes, not only to compensate for a gap in knowledge. In conclusion, this dissertation provides substantial contributions to several fields. For the field of linguistics, the study reveals that 2L1 and L2 bilingual children exhibit similar grammatical switch points. For sociolinguistics, the Dynamic Model of Social Structures contributes a conceptual tool for the analysis of language choice, which integrates individual language behaviors and social identities. Additionally, a sociolinguistic analysis reveals how 2L1 and L2 bilingual children code-switch for a variety of discursive functions. For the field of education, the results argue for the reconceptualization of code-switching as a resource, demonstrating that code-switching and diverse language choices are used for strategic purposes which often support language learning. In sum, this study sheds light on language choice and code-switching patterns among 2L1 and L2 bilingual children, contributing to the scarce research on this population and allowing a beneficial comparison between the two groups.

abstract: Identification of primary language impairment (PLI) in sequential bilingual children is challenging because of the interaction between PLI and second language (L2) proficiency. An important step in improving the accurate diagnosis of PLI in bilingual children is to investigate how differences in L2 performance are affected by a length of L2 exposure and how L2 assessment contributes to differentiation between children with and without PLI at different L2 proficiency levels. Sixty one children with typical language development (TD) ages 5;3-8 years and 12 children with PLI ages 5;5-7;8 years participated. Results revealed that bilingual children with and without PLI, who had between 1 and 3 years of L2 exposure, did not differ in mean length of utterance (MLU), number of different words, percent of maze words, and performance on expressive and receptive grammatical tasks in L2. Performance on a grammaticality judgment task by children with and without PLI demonstrated the largest effect size, indicating that it may potentially contribute to identification of PLI in bilingual populations. In addition, children with PLI did not demonstrate any association between the length of exposure and L2 proficiency, suggesting that they do not develop their L2 proficiency in relation to length of exposure in the same manner as children with TD. Results also indicated that comprehension of grammatical structures and expressive grammatical task in L2 may contribute to differentiation between the language ability groups at the low and intermediate-high proficiency levels. The discriminant analysis with the entire sample of bilingual children with and without PLI revealed that among L2 measures, only MLU contributed to the discrimination between the language ability groups. However, poor classification accuracy suggested that MLU alone is not a sufficient predictor of PLI. There were significant differences among L2 proficiency levels in children with TD in MLU, number of different words, and performance on the expressive and receptive grammatical tasks in L2, indicating that L2 proficiency level may potentially impact the differentiation between language difficulties due to typical L2 acquisition processes and PLI. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Speech and Hearing Science 2012