The Acquisition of Black Language by Spanish-Speaking Preschoolers: A Community-Based Sociolinguistic Approach to Language Assessment

Purpose: The purpose of this case series was to demonstrate a community-based sociolinguistic approach to language sample analysis (LSA) for the evalu-ation of Spanish–English bilingual preschoolers acquiring Black language (BL). As part of a comprehensive bilingual speech-language evaluation, we examined sociolinguistic variables in the context of the children’s English language sam-ples. Specific emphasis is placed on sociolinguistic information to account for all language(s) and dialect(s) in each child’s environment, BL feature patterns, and appropriate scoring procedures for characterizing language use. Method: This case series includes four monolingual English-speaking and four bilingual Spanish-English–speaking 4-year-olds in a linguistically diverse pre-school program. Play samples were collected from each child and coded for morphosyntactic features across three categories: BL, Spanish-Influenced English, and shared. Measures derived from the language samples include per-cent grammatical utterances, mean length of utterance in words, and number of different words. The children’s language is characterized within a community-based sociolinguistic approach that combines three culturally responsive methods for assessment found in the speech-language pathology literature in addition to a novel sociolinguistic questionnaire. Results: We explain how conducting LSA using a community-based socio-linguistic approach yields diagnostically relevant information that is perti-nent to conducting a comprehensive and accurate evaluation of pre-schoolers in linguistically diverse settings without the use of standardized assessments. Conclusion: A community-based sociolinguistic approach to LSA is a useful procedure for mitigating misdiagnosis in preschoolers reared in linguistically diverse environments.