A Corpus-Based Approach for the Prediction of Language Impairment in Monolingual English and Spanish-English Bilingual Children

In this paper we explore a learning-based approach to the problem of predicting language impairment in children. We analyzed spontaneous narratives of children and extracted features measuring different aspects of language including morphology, speech fluency, language productivity and vocabulary. Then, we evaluated a learning-based approach and compared its predictive accuracy against a method based on language models. Empirical results on monolingual English-speaking children and bilingual Spanish-English speaking children show the learning-based approach is a promising direction for automatic language assessment.