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Understanding how bilingual children perceive their own language abilities is an emerging priority in speech-language research, with implications for both assessment and intervention. At the 2025 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention, Christy Timm Fulkerson, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, contributed to this growing body of work as discussant for a multi-site research session examining Spanish–English bilingual children’s self-reported language proficiency through the Houston Questionnaire, or Houston-Q.

The session brought together faculty teams from Texas, South Carolina and California to explore how children’s self-reports can inform clinical practice. Spanish-English bilingual learners constitute one of the largest and fastest-growing student populations in the United States, and speech-language pathologists increasingly serve multilingual children on their caseloads. Yet capturing a comprehensive picture of a child’s language experience remains complex. Traditional reliance on caregiver and teacher reports, while essential, may be influenced by contextual or linguistic limitations.

Designed for children as young as 4, the Houston-Q offers a brief, child-friendly instrument to measure self-perceived language proficiency alongside everyday language use across home, school, literacy and peer interactions. Preliminary research suggests that such self-report measures can support strengths-based approaches to intervention by highlighting children’s lived linguistic experiences.

Drawing on four datasets across three states, Timm Fulkerson and her colleagues synthesized findings that both converged and diverged across contexts. Children consistently demonstrated clear and interpretable patterns in how they described their language abilities, with self-perceptions closely aligned with reported exposure. Those who experienced greater use of a given language generally rated themselves as more proficient in that language. While the strength of relationships between self-report data and standardized assessment outcomes varied by site and grade level, the overall findings underscored the reliability of children’s perspectives—even among younger participants.

Importantly, the research highlighted how contextual factors shape not only language experiences but also how children evaluate their own skills. These variations reinforce the need for flexible, multidimensional assessment frameworks.

The research team ultimately affirmed that incorporating children’s self-reported language experiences alongside caregiver and educator input can enhance clinical decision-making. By centering children’s voices, clinicians may advance more balanced assessment practices and more accurately identify a child’s strongest language, strengthening pathways to effective intervention.