Accurate and culturally appropriate screening and monitoring of speech and language development among Aboriginal children remains challenging for many speech pathologists in Australia.

Aboriginal children’s language development is typically assessed using tools that are designed for families speaking standard Australian English. These tools don’t reflect the diversity of Aboriginal Australian English. In urban areas, this is affecting a large population. In Western Sydney across the areas of Blacktown to Penrith over 25% of the Aboriginal population is aged between 0 to 4-years-old. In western Sydney contexts, a valid and appropriate language assessment is urgently needed to screen and track language development among Aboriginal children.

To adapt and test the validity of the Early Language Inventory (ERLI), an authorised adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI), for Aboriginal children growing up in western Sydney. The goal is to leverage the culturally safe aspects of the existing (northern Australian) ERLI tool and ensure it is relevant and safe for western Sydney families.

There were three goals: (1) develop norms on ERLI for Aboriginal children in western Sydney; (2) test ERLI's ecological validity through spontaneous language samples of parent-child interaction in free-play; (3) assess the relationship between ERLI and Hearing and Talking Scale (HATS), an already valid tool for communications skills of young Aboriginal children, if both tools identify the same children who may be at risk of language delay.

Results offered evidence towards cut-off values for typical language development in Aboriginal children in western Sydney. Ecological validity was established in the home-language samples; items on ERLI were identified throughout the audio-video recordings, and there was a significant positive relationship between child language sampling measures and child ERLI scores. The relationship between ERLI and HATS was confirmed through identification of children at risk of language delay at ages 37 to 48 months.

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Background: Difficulty with marking tense is a clinical indicator of language disorders in monolingual English-speaking children (Conti-Ramsden, 2003) and bilingual children (Jacobson & Livert, 2010) in Western communities. However, there is insufficient information on typical language development in bilingual children living in other multilingual and multicultural countries like Singapore (Teoh et al., 2018) to accurately diagnose language disorders. The present study investigates the development of English past tense and Mandarin aspect marking in Singaporean English-Mandarin typically developing bilingual children of varying language dominance by examining narrative-level discourse.

Method: 36 participants were allocated to English-dominant (n = 20) and balanced (n = 16) language dominance groups based on parental reports and performance on receptive and expressive vocabulary tasks. The participants produced narratives in English and Mandarin elicited using wordless picture books on retell and recall tasks. Their productions of English regular and irregular past tense verb forms and Mandarin perfective aspect markers were explored and the effect of language dominance on production of target forms was examined.

Results: Participants in both groups produced significantly more irregular past tense verb forms than regular past tense markers. The percentage accuracy of past tense verb forms was positively correlated with English expressive vocabulary scores. There was negligible correlation between English past tense verb forms and Mandarin perfective aspect markers and there was no correlation between Mandarin perfective aspect markers and Mandarin vocabulary scores. There was also no significant difference between language dominance groups on all target markers.

Conclusion: These findings suggest that acquisition of past tense marking in bilingual children is dependent on exposure to target verb forms. By providing normative data these results can support clinical decision making around assessment and diagnosis of language disorders in linguistically complex communities in which there are limited standardised assessment tools normed on relevant populations.

Conti-Ramsden, G. (2003). Processing and linguistic markers in young children With Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 46(5), 1029-1037. https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2003/082)

Jacobson, P., & Livert, D. (2010). English past tense use as a clinical marker in older bilingual children with language impairment. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 24(2), 101-121. https://doi.org/10.3109/02699200903437906

Teoh, W. Q., Brebner, C., & McAllister, S. (2018). Bilingual assessment practices: Challenges faced by speech-language pathologists working with a predominantly bilingual population. Speech, Language and Hearing, 21(1), 10-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/2050571X.2017.1309788