Dog Comes Home Summary

Isabel is an active, engaging, and curious young girl who has been exposed to Spanish and English throughout her four years and six months of life. In the spontaneous language sample obtained, we learn that Isabel is demonstrating second language learning characteristics, as well as some depressed linguistic skills, which differentiates her as a child with a language impairment. Influence from her first language acquisition are apparent as she consistently produces the objective pronoun “her” in place of the subjective pronoun “she” (e.g., “Hers gonna put it in the bag”), as well as inconsisstent errors of: omission of third person -s (“her say” ; “her need” ), replacement of “th” with “d” (“dat” for “that”), “no” for “don’t” (“no look”), and omission of past tense -ed (“look what happen”).
NARRATIVE MACROSTRUCTURE: When Isabel attempts to retell the story of SLAM “Dog comes home” (Crowley & Baigorri, 2014), she is able to tell the listener simple sentences with minimal content about the pictures she sees (e..g, “Her need to wash her hair.”). On her own, Isabel was not able to convey to her listener story grammar components. There is no initiating event, attempt, plan, or consequence. Instead, she produces isolated and minimal descriptions
Isabel was successful in producing a conjunction within a complex sentence when she says: “The dog is really happy because her want to kiss her.” Overall, Isabel produces limited cohesion, as seen in her lack of referents (e.g., “Her need to put it in the bag”) and limited sentence / syntactic complexity (e.g., EX: “What about her shirt?” I: “Dirty”). Once again, although Isabel’s language is simplified, she has a partial foundation for building upon during