Using Language Models to Identify Language Impairment in Spanish-English Bilingual Children

Children diagnosed with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) experience a delay in acquisition of certain language skills, with no evidence of hearing impediments, or other cognitive, behavioral, or overt neurological problems (Leonard, 1991; Paradis et al., 2005/6). Standardized tests, such as the Test for Early Grammatical Impairment, have shown to have great predictive value for assessing English speaking monolingual children. Diagnosing bilingual children with SLI is far more complicated due to the following factors: lack of standardized tests, lack of bilingual clinicians, and more importantly, the lack of a deep understanding of bilingualism and its implications on language disorders. In addition, bilingual children often exhibit code-switching patterns that will make the assessment task even more challenging. In this paper, we present preliminary results from using language models to help discriminating bilingual children with SLI from Typically-Developing (TD) bilingual children.