No Access
Research Article | 05 May 2026
What Can English Tell Us? English Tense/Agreement Measures as Tools for Identification of Spanish–English Bilingual Children With Developmental Language Disorder
Juliana Ronderos , and Anny Castilla-Earls
https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_AJSLP-25-00923
Purpose:
The aim of this study was to examine the potential clinical use of English-only measures of tense/agreement to identify Spanish–English bilingual children with developmental language disorders (DLDs).
Method:
Participants included 129 Spanish–English bilingual children aged 4–7 years; 55 children were classified as having DLD. Language samples were elicited in English through story retell and story generation tasks to calculate tense/agreement composite measures of emerging diversity (tense marker total), productivity (tense/agreement productivity), and accuracy (modified version of the finite verb morphology composite). We investigated whether these measures in English show group-level differences in bilingual children with DLD from peers with typically developing language (TD) and the diagnostic accuracy of these measures while taking into account English vocabulary and age.
Results:
The group of children with DLD significantly underperformed the group with TD across all tense/agreement composite measures. When using optimized cutoff scores, tense/agreement measures yielded mixed results for diagnostic accuracy to identify children with DLD as correctly having DLD.
Conclusions:
Best practices recommend using converging evidence from both languages when assessing bilingual children. Given that English assessment is often the primary tool available to school-based clinicians, our findings indicate that English-only tense/agreement measures may provide valuable descriptive information about bilingual children’s English language development. However, these measures should be interpreted within a comprehensive evaluation of language abilities and should not be used in isolation for diagnostic purposes.
No Access
Research Article | 05 May 2026
A Comparison of Four Selected Acoustic Measures in Detecting Voice Quality Changes With Botulinum Toxin Treatment in Adductor-Type Laryngeal Dystonia
Jenny L. Pierce, Kaitlyn Dwenger, Anuja Sharma, Skyler G. Jennings, Marshall Smith, and Julie Barkmeier-Kraemer
https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_AJSLP-25-00153
Purpose:
Adductor-type laryngeal dystonia (AdLD) is a voice disorder with substantial negative effects. The current standard treatment is botulinum toxin (BoNT) injections, with novel treatments on the horizon. The aim of this study was to determine the sensitivity of selected acoustic measures to measure voice quality change from pre-BoNT to the participants’ perceived maximum benefit from BoNT.
Method:
Twenty-three participants with AdLD underwent acoustic recordings at pre-BoNT and a subset of 12 participants during the participants’ perceived maximum benefit from BoNT. Four acoustic measures were employed: (a) cepstral peak prominence-smoothed (CPPS) estimated in Praat, (b) the cepstral spectral index of dysphonia (CSID), (c) percent creak (%creak), and (d) sharpness (a measure of vocal strain). The four measures were also compared with listener ratings and Voice Handicap Index (VHI-10) scores.
Results:
The CPPS, CSID, and %creak measures showed significant treatment-related change (p < .001). Effect sizes were large for CPPS (.97) and moderate for CSID (.68) and %creak (.62). Correlations with listener ratings were strong for CPPS (−.66), moderate for CSID (.58) and %creak (.48), and very weak for sharpness (.19). Correlations with VHI-10 were moderate for CPPS (−.53), weak for %creak (.36) and CSID (.33), and very weak for sharpness (.19).
Conclusions:
Based on these results, CPPS, CSID, and %creak showed utility in assessing voice quality change from pre- to post-BoNT treatment in those with AdLD, with some differences across measures. Future research with novel treatments for AdLD may benefit from utilization of these measures, including comparison of effect sizes with the degree of improvement from BoNT outcomes.