Documenting the Home and Community Storytelling Practices of Mexican-American Bilingual Children with Developmental Language Disorder

Project Summary/Abstract Culturally competent assessment tools are a crucial component in providing bilingual Latinx children with a free and appropriate public education. However, many assessment tools used with culturally and linguistically diverse children are based on WEIRD norms. Health disparities occur when children’s linguistic skills are measured up against WEIRD norms rather than practices from their own linguistic and cultural communities. This research will (1) provide documentation of storytelling practices and styles for bilingual Latinx children and (2) compare the utility of using measures derived from within the linguistic community with measures derived from WEIRD language norms. Ethnographic observations, interviews, and surveys will serve as the main methods to gather what storytelling practices bilingual Latinx children with DLD are typically exposed to. Narrative sample analysis will be utilized to analyze children’s narratives. Two scoring systems will then be used: one derived from the data gathered in (1) and the other will be based on extant, traditional measures of narratives. By documenting the storytelling practices of bilingual Latinx children with DLD, we can utilize culturally and linguistically appropriate descriptions of linguistic backgrounds for linguistically minoritized children with disabilities. By comparing performance based on community-generated measures with extant measures of narratives, we can learn which methods best fit culturally specific ways of telling stories in narrative performance. This will allow us to understand normal linguistic processes in culturally and linguistically diverse communities that we can then use to understand disordered linguistic processes in these communities, thereby reducing health disparities. This fellowship includes mentorship and training opportunities with researchers across California, including a data collection site in Santa Ana, CA. The training goals for this fellowship include training in qualitative research methods and psychometrics.