Elizabeth D. Peña
Bio
Elizabeth Peña, Ph.D. is a professor in the School of Education at UCI. She is a certified Speech-Language Pathologist and is a Fellow of the American Speech Language Hearing Association. Her research focuses on bilingualism and identification of developmental language disorder (DLD) within this population. Bilingual children are often misdiagnosed with both over- and under-identification of DLD. This leads to inequitable treatment and delays in identification and provision of appropriate services. Dr. Peña’s work on bilingual DLD led to development of assessment protocols (including dynamic assessment and the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment) that have high classification accuracy. Currently, she is working on a project to develop an approach to identify DLD in bilingual children using English as the test language where item selection is tailored to children’s level of English exposure. These projects support accurate and timely diagnostic decisions for bilingual children in the U.S. They put useful tools into the hands of the bilingual and monolingual SLPs in the U.S. who need to make accurate and timely diagnostic decisions about bilingual children.
Unpacking Developmental Language Disorder: Assessment in Bilingual Contexts
The last 20 years have seen an increased interest in bilingual assessment for identification of DLD. While we have an increased understanding of bilingual development, many myths persist that affect identification of DLD. A focus on markers across different languages has moved us forward in better understanding how to construct measures to identify DLD in bilingual populations. This shift has resulted in development of better measures with good classification accuracy when children are tested in both languages and their patterns of performance are considered in an integrated way. But, bilingual assessment is not always possible. We have an emerging profile of how DLD presents in English language learners. It may be possible to leverage this profile develop measures that are better tailored to assess individual children in their L2 based on their language experience.
