BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Health providers need reliable estimates of the number of families with limited English proficiency (LEP) to assess language need and language service provision. Hospitals often lack reliable language screening tools and fail to provide interpretation for LEP families. The objective of this study was to develop a simple audit tool to more accurately identify LEP patient...

Recent studies have shown fewer errors and less likelihood of clinical consequences when limited English proficient patients have access to trained professional interpreters. In this study, the authors compare interpreter errors and their potential clinical consequences in hospital pediatric encounters using professional interpreters versus ad hoc interpreters versus no interpreters. The study ...

Background: The P600 brain wave reflects syntactic processes in response to different first language (L1) syntactic violations, syntactic repair, structural reanalysis, and specific semantic components. Unlike semantic processing, aspects of the second language (L2) syntactic processing differ from the L1, particularly at lower levels of proficiency. At higher L2 proficiency, syntactic violatio...

The Asian and Pacific Islander (API) population in the United States is ethnically and linguistically diverse. American API patients in the most disadvantaged subgroups (limited English proficient, low income, low literate, etc) are at risk for having unmet communication needs. Medical education programs and primary care physicians need to address issues of culture, language, and health literac...

OBJECTIVE To determine if professional medical interpreters have a positive impact on clinical care for limited English proficiency (LEP) patients. DATA SOURCES A systematic literature search, limited to the English language, in PubMed and PsycINFO for publications between 1966 and September 2005, and a search of the Cochrane Library. STUDY DESIGN Any peer-reviewed article which compared at...

As noted in the supplement to the U.S. Surgeon General's report on mental health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001), overcoming language access barriers associated with limited English proficiency (LEP) should help to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in mental health care access and quality. Federal policy requires remedial action to overcome language barriers: Under Ti...

This study attempts to compare the Inter-Stress Interval (ISI) patterns of English between the native speakers of English and Korean. One of the invariable results of the experiments about English speech rhythm has been that the strict concept of isochronism did not seem to exist at least in the surface phonetic level. However, the remarkable difference shown from the production experiment of t...

The purpose of the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigation was to examine how language proficiency and orthographic transparency (letter-sound mapping consistency) modulate neural activity during bilingual single word reading. Spanish-English bilingual participants, more fluent in their second language (L2; English) than their native language (L1; Spanish), were asked...

This study examined language barriers to health care access among a population-based sample of Medicare seniors in California in 2001 and 2003. Results indicate that Medicare beneficiaries with limited English proficiency (LEP) had less access to a usual source of care and were less likely to receive preventive cancer screening tests. LEP Medicare beneficiaries who also were covered by Medicaid...