Identifying Strategies to Support the Communication of Prelinguistic Bilinguals with Severe Disabilities

Abstract

The prevalence of children with severe and multiple disabilities who come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds increased considerably with the rise of immigration to the U.S. However, there is very little research about the way that children with disabilities who come from a culturally and linguistically diverse background communicate and develop communication skills (Mueller, Singer, & Carranza, 2006). Furthermore, there is no established term for describing this group of children. That is why this study uses the term Prelinguistic bilinguals to define individuals who use one or more languages at a nonverbal level in their everyday lives. This definition of prelinguistic bilinguals was built upon Grosjean’s (2010) definition of bilingualism. Knowing how prelinguistic bilingual children communicate and develop communication skills is fundamental for their educational team in order to effectively interact and support the children’s communication, which in turn would have a positive effect on their learning outcomes. The main goals of this study were to describe the communication of prelinguistic bilingual children and to learn more about what teachers, teacher assistants, speech language pathologists, and parents do to support their communication in English and Spanish. This qualitative study uses a constructivist theory approach to make in-case and across-case analyses of three case studies. Findings for the study indicated that prelinguistic bilingual children were not only aware of a difference between the two languages, but could also express a preference for one of their languages. Most of the communication supports that the participating adults provided for prelinguistic bilingual children were the same communication supports used for monolingual children developing language, which did not consider the children’s bilingual needs.