Assessing Home Language

After English, Mandarin is the most widely used language by young children in Canberra. Mandarin is the term used in English to refer to a number Chinese varieties spoken in northern and southwestern China, and the standardised varieties taught in schools across mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia. Historically, many different languages have been used across China, some related to each other and some unrelated, as shown on the map below. Mandarin varieties have been spoked across northern China, and southwestern China. ...

In a nonword repetition task, the child is presented with an unfamiliar sequence of sounds that could, plausibly, form a word in the language. This stimulus may be recorded, or read aloud by the examiner. The child is asked to repeat the nonword, as accurately as possible. These tasks might be familiar from the CTOPP-2 or the TILLS. Nonword repetition has been widely studied for its ability to help identify language disorders in both monolingual, and multilingual children. There are two recent reviews and meta-analyses, by Schwob et al. (2021) (both monolingual and multilingual children) and Ortiz (2021b) (specific to bilingual children), which are both available to ASHA members (or SPA members via CINAHL). ...

McLeod et al. (2017) (open access) have an excellent tutorial for speech pathologists needing to assess speech production (e.g., speech articulation) in a language they do not speak. The tutorial is open access, easy to read, appropriately detailed, and (in my view) theoretically reasonable. The authors discuss practical, as well as cultural and linguistic considerations. So I’m not going to say much more here - go and read their tutorial! ...

There are many reasons that understanding a child’s language development, when the child has been exposed to one or more languages other than English, can be difficult - the language barrier itself is only the start! Building the cultural and linguistic diversity of the speech pathology workforce is essential - both to support families with similar backgrounds, as well as to help build the field’s understanding of cultural and linguistic diversity more broadly. But in a culturally diverse city, there will always be reasons why finding a cultural and linguistic ‘match’ between family and clinician is not possible, or not realistic, in every case. ...

In a speech pathology context, there are many reasons why understanding a child’s skills in the language(s) spoken at home may be important, even if this is not the language of education. These include: being able to provide an accurate response to the child, family, education, and/or health professional’s concerns and reason for referral (e.g., is the child experiencing some kind of difficulty in learning language, consistent with a speech or language disorder?); being able to recommend or provide supports that are most likely to be helpful to the child and family, and address their priorities. In a city where more than 100 different languages are used by families in the home, this means that understanding language development across a diverse range of languages is essential for any speech pathologist working with children’s speech and language. ...