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Using Drawings to Understand Jamaican Children’s Talking Experiences 

• Recent evidence suggests that drawings offer SLPs an unbiased approach for working with typically-developing and disordered children across language contexts (Holliday et al., 2009; McCormack et al., 2010; McLeod et al., 2015)

• We explored the talking experiences of young children who speak more than one language on a daily basis.

 

Characterizing Grammar Profiles Using Child and Adult Models

• Without specific knowledge of dual language profiles, dual language learners are at-risk for misdiagnosis.

• The purpose of this study is to investigate the appropriateness of standardized assessments of expressive language in Jamaican Creole (JC)-and English-speaking preschoolers. 

• We sought to inform the interpretation of assessment results based on adult models from the same linguistic community. 

 

Using Acoustic Methods to Characterize Speech Productions

• We seek to understand and characterize the various productions of single words by Jamaican Creole (JC)-and English-speaking preschoolers.  

• The purpose of this NIH-funded study is to build models of speech sound productions for this population and help with diagnostic accuracy.  

• We use the Phon 3 software program and Praat functions for speech analysis of acoustic data.  

 

Intelligibility in Context Scale as an Assessment Tool

• The Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS; McLeod, et al., 2012) is a validated speech screening tool that has been translated to Jamaican Creole (JC). 

• We investigated the clinical utility of the ICS and ICS-JC for English and JC-speaking bilingual preschoolers. 

• We address the need for research-based screening tools for understudied bilingual populations.