What is it about?
We often wonder how bilinguals perform on listening tasks in either of the two languages they speak. One assumption is that, if one does not do well in one language, she/he probably is going to do better in the other language. Our study here included a group of Spanish-English bilinguals who varied in their Spanish and English proficiency. All listeners listened to English and Spanish words in quiet and in noise. We found that regardless of the listening condition bilinguals' performance in Spanish was not correlated to their performance in English. Some of them ranked higher in both languages than the rest.
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Why is it important?
This study is in fact the first to show Spanish-English bilingual data on two most commonly used clinical word recognition test (a handful of preexisting studies looked at sentence recognition). As such, our data should be very helpful for clinical practitioners who work closely with the Spanish-English bilingual community. Our study also argues against the assumption that if a Spanish-English bilingual listener does not do well in English, that is because she/he is bilingual and probably will do fine if tested in Spanish. Such assumption is not supported by our data and can mislead the practitioner to make wrong recommendations.
Perspectives
Despite the effort by many scholars in our field, we still know very little how bilinguals perform on clinically relevant tasks. We all know how fast the Spanish-English bilingual population has been growing. Considerably more research is needed to catch up so that our clinicians can best render their diagnostic and rehabilitative services to this unique population. This study is the very first of a series of effort made by our laboratory. We followed it with a study that validated the model proposed here (Shi, 2014) as well as studies that looked at how familiarity of the test words (English and Spanish) interfere with performance (Shi & Sanchez, 2011) and how American Spanish dialects affect performance on the Spanish test (Shi & Canizales, 2013).
Lu Shi
Long Island University - Brooklyn Campus
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Spanish/English Bilingual Listeners on Clinical Word Recognition Tests: What to Expect and How to Predict, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, October 2010, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/1092-4388(2010/09-0199).
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