Misdiagnoses Of Impairments: A Case Study

Are Bilingual Children at a High Risk for Misdiagnoses of Impairments? One of the many duties of a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) is to provide services to clients regardless of their cultural and linguistic backgrounds. This requires SLPs to often treat clients who speak multiple languages, including languages other than their own (Verdon et al. 2014). In recent years, there has been a significant growth in the U.S. of individuals with linguistically diverse backgrounds. As a result, accurately treating and diagnosing impairments has become increasingly complicated (Caesar, Kohler 2007). The challenge of accurately diagnosing bilingual children is made more difficult by the fact that there are hundreds of different languages and dialects …show more content…
However, when assessing bilingual children for language impairments, standardized tests can produce misleading results. Standardized tests typically have norms based on white monolingual children and therefore cannot be relied on to produce accurate results for children of different cultural or linguistic backgrounds (De Lamo White & Jin, 2011). This causes standardized testing to be a problematic identifier for language impairments among bilingual individuals (Hasson et al, …show more content…
It is believed to reduce the linguistic and cultural biases that are associated with standardized tests (De Lamo White & Jin, 2011). Standardized testing only reflects the individual's past and present functioning whereas dynamic assessment aims to tests an individual's potential to learn in a situation. Professor Reuven Feuerstein is an eminent professor known for his application of dynamic assessment. Feuerstein's approach to dynamic assessment involves a test-teach-retest model. This is only one of many dynamic assessment techniques however, unlike standardized tests, dynamic assessment does not rely on data that is normed on one population (Hasson et al., 2012). This allows for a more accurate assessment of language impairments for people of various cultural and linguistic backgrounds. If a child has a language impairment, they will not improve without long-term intervention. If a child does not have a language impairment, but perhaps just a language deficit caused by linguistic or cultural differences, then they will improve with short-term exposure to good language models. We can apply Feuerstein's model of test-teach-retest style dynamic assessment to a hypothetical situation involving a bilingual child. If the child does not have a language impairment, then we would expect to see improvements in the retest portion of the model, after teaching good language behavior. Conversely,