Speech disorders among bilingual Latino children

The University of Arizona is tackling a critical issue in Arizona, the diagnosis and misdiagnosis of speech disorders among bilingual Latino children. An associate professor at the UA, Leah Fabiano, was granted a grant to research the issue in heavily Latino populated areas.

“We’re developing a test that will accurately separate bilingual children with or without speech disorders because currently most of the test that speech pathologist is using on children has been developed for English-speaking children only and they’re not looking at children who speak more than one language,” said Fabiano.

Fabiano said that if experts continue to miss-diagnosis children we can miss diagnosis a generation of children.