Disclosures

A co-author of this study, Elizabeth D. Peña, Ph.D. is the author of the book, Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA). Although this book was not used in the present study, forms from portions of the book were used. She has disclosed that she receives royalties from sales of the BESA book. Portions of this book, such as Bilingual Input Output Survey (BIOS) and ITALK, were used for this study. Course offerings will only cover information that pertains to the effective and safe use specific forms/tools from this book, and the Bilingual English Spanish Oral Screener (BESOS). This presentation will focus exclusively on forms/tools authored by Dr. Peña and will not include information on other similar or related forms/tools.

Funding for this article was provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) Grant.

Christine E. Fiestas, Ph.D.

Financial: Christine E. Fiestas, Ph.D. disclosed that she received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

Nonfinancial: Christine E. Fiestas Ph.D. is an associate professor in the graduate Speech- Pathology program at St. Augustine University for Health Sciences-Austin campus. She is a bilingual speech-language pathologist and her clinical specialty areas are in the assessment and treatment of developmental language disorders from birth through school ages as well as the assessment of reading and fluency disorders. Her lines of research include the assessment and treatment of language and literacy disorders for individuals who are bilingual, multilingual and speakers of dialects which are not mainstream English. These lines of inquiry include development of language assessment instruments for diagnosis, screening and progress monitoring measures for diverse children including children who are bilingual as well as intervention research to support both languages of bilingual children with language and literacy disorders.

Mirza J. Lugo-Neris, Ph.D.

Financial: Mirza Lugo-Neris, Ph.D. has no financial relationships to disclose.

Nonfinancial: Mirza Lugo-Neris, Ph.D. is a bilingual speech-language pathologist and Clinical Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on assessment and treatment of Spanish-English bilingual children with language impairment, literacy-based interventions, and the scholarship of teaching and learning in communication sciences and disorders.

Amy S. Pratt, Ph.D.

Financial: Amy Pratt, Ph.D. has no financial relationships to disclose.

Nonfinancial: Amy Pratt, Ph.D. is a post-doctoral scholar from the University of Texas, Austin, working at University of California, Irvine as a visiting specialist on the Language Evaluation and Development in Education Research (LEADER) project. Amy's research investigates the typical and atypical language development of children who speak Spanish. She is particularly interested in how young children's language ability serves as a foundation for later literacy development, and how children's language and literacy growth can be supported via evidence-based, culturally appropriate intervention. Amy received her Ph.D. in Speech and Hearing Science from The Ohio State University in 2017. Her dissertation, titled "The oral language and emergent literacy development of Spanish-speaking children with and without Specific Language Impairment," was awarded a Presidential Dissertation Fellowship. She has a master's degree in Foreign and Second Language Education and a bachelor's degree in Hispanic Linguistics. Dr. Pratt?s research explores the co-occurrence of language disorders and reading disorders in children who speak Spanish. Before receiving her PhD in Speech & Hearing Science from the Ohio State University in 2017, she was a teacher in a dual-language school. She currently works as a postdoctoral scholar in the HABLA Lab at University of California, Irvine, where she is involved in the critical work of improving bilingual assessment and intervention.

Elizabeth D. Peña, Ph.D.

Financial: Elizabeth D. Peña, Ph.D. is the author of the BESA and receives royalties from its sales. While the authors did not use the BESA in the current study, they did use two forms from it, which included the BIOS and ITALK to describe participant characteristics.

Nonfinancial: Elizabeth Peña, Ph.D. is a professor in the School of Education at UCI. She is a certified Speech-Language Pathologist and is a Fellow of the American Speech Language Hearing Association. Her research focuses on two lines of inquiry that address the goal of differentiating language impairment from language difference. These two interrelated areas include dynamic assessment and semantic development in bilinguals leading to test development. Dynamic assessment tests ability to learn new language skills. In contrast, standardized tests asses what children already know. The advantage of focusing on learning is that it greatly reduces bias by not assuming lack of knowledge is lack of ability. She further focuses on language impairment in children from diverse linguistic backgrounds. Specifically, she is interested in how children from diverse linguistic backgrounds learn new language skills and how they lexicalize their conceptual knowledge across two languages. Through careful qualitative and description of bilingual children's performance, she is currently focusing on potential similarities among typical monolingual and bilingual children as well as differences between typical and impaired bilingual or monolingual children. Her work on test development for bilinguals has focused on assessment of semantic skills using a battery of related tasks. Because typical vocabulary tests rely on knowledge of specific vocabulary items children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds often perform below age expectations, possibly leading to misdiagnosis. The bilingual semantics test tasks are designed to allow responses that reflect cultural knowledge and allow children to respond in Spanish, English, or both.

Lisa M. Bedore, Ph.D.

Financial: Lisa M. Bedore, Ph.D., disclosed that she received funding from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Grant 1R21DC011126-01.

Nonfinancial: Lisa M. Bedore, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Temple University. The primary goal of her research is to understand how children integrate information across linguistic domains to support language learning. Two windows into this question are bilingualism and developmental language disorders. Bilingual language learners are challenged because they have divided language experiences and they must integrate information across domains. One of Dr. Bedore's key contributions in this area has been her work on tools supporting our understanding of children's language experience and the relationship between patterns of language experience and language outcomes. Dr. Bedore's interest in intervention ties to these questions. Through the study of intervention we can better understand how to leverage children's experience using ecologically valid tasks that are closely aligned to the curriculum and thus reduce academic and literacy risk associated with developmental language disorders. Dr. Bedore's research has been funded through the National Institutes of Health for over 20 years and she is a Fellow of the American Speech Language and Hearing Association.