 |
| Milijana Buac |
It is therefore not surprising that when parents receive news that their young toddler may have a language disorder, they become worried and concerned.
According to Dr. Milijana Buac, this news may be problematic if the child is reared in a bilingual environment. “In my work, I noticed that the language-assessment tools were biased against bilingual children. They are biased because they were not normed using bilingual children but monolingual children.”
This is a problem because often the bilingual children score lower on these assessments when compared to monolinguals peers, sparking concerns of a delay.
“A low score by a bilingual child may not indicate a language disorder but just a language difference, reflecting the fact that they are learning two languages.” explained Buac.
A CISLL affiliate, Buac is on the faculty of the Speech-Language Pathology Unit housed within the Allied Health and Communicative Disorders Division within NIU’s College of Health and Human Sciences. Buac is a speech-language pathologist by training.
Using biased language-assessment tools is a problem potentially affecting many lives. In fact, 22% of children in the United States speak a language other than English at home.
Buac studies how a bilingual context affects language and cognitive development and how to make such language assessment tools less biased.
As one example of her research on language development, her dissertation used an eye-tracking visual world paradigm to examine how monolingual and bilingual children learn new words from non-native input.
In the visual world paradigm, participants are shown four unfamiliar objects on a screen. Each object is presented with a spoken presentation of a new “name” for each. The new name is a made-up word, so that it is unfamiliar to all participants. Later, participants are shown two of the objects and hear the word that was presented with one of them. Using an eye-tracker, the researcher measures whether and how quickly the child looks to the correctly-paired object. A shorter response delay and higher proportion of looks to the correct object indicates that the child has learned the new word.
In her dissertation, Buac was interested in how accents may impact the learning of new words. She presented the “names” in the visual world paradigm to typically-developing children in three different accents: native English, Spanish-accented English, and Korean-accented English.
The accents approximate how mono- and bilingual children may learn new words at home. English-Spanish bilingual children would be familiar with both native English and Spanish accents, whereas the monolingual children would only be familiar with the native English accent. Both types of speakers would be less familiar with the Korean accent.
She found that children living in a monolingual native English family learned new words best when presented by a native English-accented speaker, followed by a Spanish-accented English speaker, followed by a Korean-accented English speaker. However, children living in a bilingual environment showed no difference in learning between the native English and Spanish accents, and both of these led to higher learning than words presented in a Korean accent.
“The results showed that the familiarity of the accent matters. If you are familiar with the accent, then you learn new words faster than if you are not,” explained Buac. “I looked at learning because previous research has looked at how accents affect the time to process language but not on how accents affect learning.”
Buac is extending this research by looking at word learning in children who have a language impairment.
“The reason why I wanted to start with typically-developing children is to get a baseline. Now I would like to see if the accents are a greater impediment for children with a language disorder. A primary theory of language impairment assumes that the impaired individual has trouble processing spoken input. I would expect that children with a language disorder would be hindered even more than usual when presented with new words in an unfamiliar accent,” elaborated Buac.
As an expert in language disorders, Buac gets many questions from concerned parents.
In particular, she is often asked by parents of a child in a bilingual environment who have been newly diagnosed with a language disorder which language should be spoken at home.
“I tell them to speak which language they are most comfortable with. Never take away a language, because if a child is able to learn one language, they are going to be able to learn another. Parents often think it is better to stick to one language, let’s say English. But that could hinder the child if no one else in the family speaks English,” explained Buac.
As a new faculty member at NIU, Buac is busy planning future experiments and writing grants to fund research on how bilingual contexts affect language and cognitive development.
About the author: Keith Millis is on CISLL’s executive board and is a professor of psychology at NIU.
