Multilingual Assessment

This study was in collaboration with former CAT Lab Honor's thesis student, Katherine Stariknok, and current lab member Professor Meg Morgan. Language assessments are used to screen and diagnose children with language disorders. Many speech-language pathologists (SLP) practicing in Spanish in the United States do not speak Spanish as their first language, so they are administering these assessments in accented speech. This study aims to find what effect an SLP’s accent will have on a bilingual child’s language assessment. Initial findings show that participants were largely able to understand words in the L2 accent, with most of the errors due to several repeating consonantal features (i.e., voicing alone; place and manner of articulation). The broader impact of this work is to understand the constellation of phonetic and acoustic differences between L1 and L2 speakers to help SLPs choose which aspects of their pronunciations are most salient and likely to impact test results, which may lead to misdiagnoses.