Speech in Little Bilinguals Lab (SLBL)

Lab Mission

Bilingual children are at elevated risk for being clinically misdiagnosed in the area of speech and language development. This is in part due to there being many paths to bilingualism, and children even from similar language backgrounds may have a large variety of language experiences. For most language combinations, speech-language pathologists must rely heavily on clinical judgement to determine whether bilingual children present with speech and language disorders based on their linguistic background. The accuracy of diagnosis decreases when clinicians do not have language expertise in both of a child’s languages. Yet, in 2022, only 2.7% of service providers in the US could provide clinical speech services in a language other than English or Spanish. This falls well below the growing 8.4% of the US population who spoke a language other than English or Spanish at home in 2019. It is crucial to meet the linguistic needs of the growing population of linguistically heterogeneous children in the US. The Speech in Little Bilinguals Lab (SLBL) focuses on the development of speech perception and speech production in children who are exposed to more than one language at home, in the community, or at school. We aim to build the knowledge base necessary to make evidence-based clinical decisions on a variety of bilingual populations.