Spanish and English Morphosyntax Changes in Bilingual Children: What SLPs Need to Know

Background

Morphosyntax—the grammar rules governing word endings, tense, and sentence structure—is often a sensitive marker of developmental language disorder (DLD). For bilingual Spanish–English children, morphosyntactic growth doesn’t always mirror monolingual norms, making diagnosis and intervention especially complex. A common challenge for SLPs is knowing whether morphosyntactic errors signal a language difference or an underlying disorder.

Lam et al. (2025) explored this issue by tracking morphosyntactic growth in bilingual children with and without DLD. Crucially, they analyzed clusters of morpho-syntactic difficulty (see our previous blog post) to identify which grammatical features are easier, intermediate, or harder to acquire. Their findings give SLPs a practical framework for assessment and therapy planning.

Research Question

The study asked: How do Spanish and English morphosyntactic skills develop over time in bilingual children with typical development compared to those with DLD?

Study Design: Participants, Measures, Groups

• Participants: 199 Spanish–English bilingual children, ages 7–10

  • 165 typically developing (TD)

  • 34 with DLD

• Measure: Spanish and English morphosyntax cloze tasks from the BESA-ME (field-test version).

• Procedure: Each child completed both the Spanish and English tasks one year apart.

• Groups: TD vs. DLD

Results: Highlights & Limitations

Highlights:

• Children improved in both Spanish and English over one year (using raw accuracy scores).

• Items were grouped into clusters of difficulty:

  • For Spanish:

    • Level 1 (easiest): preterite (perfect past)

    • Level 2 (intermediate): adjectives, imperfect, subjunctive clauses

    • Level 3 (hardest): relative clauses

  • For English:

    • Level 1 (easiest): copula, passive voice, negation with auxiliary

    • Level 2 (intermediate): third person singular, plural nouns

    • Level 3 (harder): possessives, regular past tense, question inversion, relative clauses

    • Level 4 (hardest): irregular past tense, prepositions

• Performance on easier clusters at Year 1 predicted performance on harder clusters at Year 2.

• Children with DLD had lower scores overall but showed similar growth patterns.

Limitations:

• Small DLD sample (34 children) → findings about DLD need caution.

• Cloze tasks only tested a subset of grammar (not every possible structure).

Clinical Takeaways

• Use the clusters as a roadmap.

  • Struggles in later clusters (e.g., past tense, subjunctive) alone may reflect typical development.

  • Struggles across multiple clusters in both languages are more concerning for DLD.

• Plan intervention by difficulty level.

  • Build accuracy on earlier clusters (e.g., articles, plurals, copulas) to support later growth.

  • Focus therapy where children with DLD often stall — in the intermediate and harder clusters.

• Assessment tip: Look for persistent errors in both languages across levels. Single-language errors may be part of bilingual development.

Bottom line for SLPs:
Lam et al. adds to our knowledge about grammar skill growth in bilingual children. The difficulty groupings they found have some similarities in the sequence of development from the Baron et al. study we covered in this blog post. That previous study looked at 4-7:6 year olds while this study extend to children through age 10 years. These clusters could be helpful in identifying how far along in morphosyntactic development a child is in, what to target first, and to track progress.