October 26, 2005
How can schools best identify and assist bilingual children with
language disorders? That’s what St. John’s College Assistant
Professor Peggy Jacobson of the Speech, Communication and Theatre
Department expects to find out through her study of
Spanish-speaking children who are also learning English. She will
be the principal investigator in a three-year, cross-sectional
study of first- to third-grade bilingual students recently funded
by a $150,000 grant from the National Institute of Deafness and
Communication Disorders/ National Institutes of Health.
Insight into second-language development among bilingual
children will help us address issues relevant to bilingual children
with specific language impairment, says Jacobson. Her study,
“Morphology in Typical and Atypical Language Acquisition” will
collect data from 90 Spanish/English-speaking bilingual children to
measure the students’ overall language proficiency and development
of grammatical structure in each language, as well as their ability
to produced oral narratives. The data should make it easier to
identify more accurately bilingual children with language
impairment, she says.
“Most of what we know about language acquisition is based on
monolithic monolingual development,” she explains. “Bilingual
children don’t look like monolinguals in either language. With
English and Spanish, each language influences the acquisition of
the other in ways that are not fully understood.” Jacobson’s
research will monitor the development of Spanish and English across
three age groups to see how language acquisition changes over time.
Half of the children in the study will be bilinguals who appear to
be developing typically in their language acquisition skills; the
other half will be bilinguals who have been identified as language
impaired. None of the children studied will have mental retardation
or neurological-behavioral conditions, or suffer from hearing
loss.
Professor Jacobson cites 2001 U.S. Census Bureau
statistics to support her contention that there’s a need for a
better understanding of specific language impairment among
bilingual children. According to the recent U.S. Census, close to
18 percent of people over the age of five in the U.S. speak a
language other than English in the home, and 7 percent of these
individuals are bilingual with specific language impairment.
Professor Jacobson’s study will also test some theories on tense
marking, and number and gender agreement in participants’ language
acquisition in both English and Spanish. “It’s believed that
bilinguals with language impairment tend to have difficulty with
the past tense when speaking in English; Spanish-speaking children
with specific language impairment tend to have trouble with direct
object pronouns,” she explains.
The children will be studied in their homes with a family member
present. They will be shown pictures on a computer screen, and will
hear language and be asked to respond. English testing will be
conducted by native English speakers; Spanish testing will be
conducted by native Spanish speakers. Jacobson decided to study
first- through third-grade students because bilingual classes end
in most school districts by fourth grade. Professor Jacobson hopes
to study bilingual children in the Central Islip, Bay Shore and
Brentwood communities of Suffolk County, Long Island, areas in
which she worked for many years as a speech-language pathologist
before joining the faculty of St. John’s four years ago.
Professor Jacobson and her examiners are all fluent in Spanish.
Two of her consultants who will conduct speech and language
testing, Yesenia Phillips and Maritza Cajigas, graduated from the
Speech Department in May. Edith Tsouri a graduate student in
psychology here at St. John’s, is the Project Manager
In addition to her work on Long Island with Spanish-speaking
children, Professor Jacobson has used her Spanish by volunteering
her services in Nicaragua through a program run by her Centerport,
Long Island, church. She started going to Nicaragua three years ago
and worked with residents with speech and language problems. She
also helped a women’s group write a grant. This January, she is
returning with Associate Professor Nancy Colodny, also from her
department, who’s an expert in swallowing problems. Coincidentally,
consultants Phillips and Cajigas have also participated in the same
church-run volunteer program in Nicaragua.
“All of us must go there at our own expense,” says Jacobson.
“There will be a fundraiser next month at Dante’s to defray the
cost of supplies.”