Purpose Dynamic assessment (DA) has generally been accepted and recommended for use with bilingual children; however, no meta-analysis or systematic review of the diagnostic accuracy for language impairment within this population exists. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the current use of DA and its diagnostic accuracy for language impairment in bilingual children. Method Through a key word search of PsycINFO, ERIC, Academic Search Premier, and MEDLINE via EBSCOhost, 7 studies were identified. Participants ranged from 3 to 8 years old. Areas of language addressed through DA included labeling single words, morpheme rule learning, ability to learn nonwords, and narratives. Study results were analyzed with respect to diagnostic accuracy, participant modifiability, and methodological quality. Results Overall, participants with typically developing language received higher scores on the language assessments used in DA studies compared to participants with a language impairment. Gain scores were generally not useful for differentiating between children who did or did not have language impairments. However, clinician judgments of modifiability during the teaching phase of DA consistently yielded significant group effects favoring the typically developing children. Across the 7 studies, sensitivity and specificity were reasonably high, with all studies meeting or close to meeting the set criteria (≥ 0.8). Conclusion Suggestive evidence supports the use of DA for diagnosing language disorders in bilingual children. However, limitations in the methodological quality of the studies that were reviewed could have resulted in inflated diagnostic accuracy and decreased validity. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.8232926

This exploratory study assessed the use of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine hemodynamic response patterns during sentence processing. Four groups of participants: monolingual English children, bilingual Chinese-English children, bilingual Chinese-English adults and monolingual English adults were given an agent selection syntactic processing task. Bilingual child participants were classified as simultaneous or sequential bilinguals to examine the impact of first language, age of second-language acquisition (AoL2A), and the length of second language experience on behavioral performance and cortical activation. Participants were asked to select the agent of four types of sentences: subject-verb-object (SVO), passive (PAS), subject-extracted relative clause (SR), and object-extracted relative clause (OR) adopted from the “Whatdunit” task by Montgomery et al. (2016). Semantic cues were removed by using inanimate nouns for agents and patients, which constrained participants to make decisions based on syntactic knowledge. Behavioral results showed greater accuracy for canonical SVO and SR sentence types than for noncanonical OR and PAS sentence types, which aligns with prior studies. Neuroimaging results revealed greater hemodynamic responses to relative clauses (i.e., SR and OR sentences) than to simple sentences (SVO and PAS), especially for Chinese-English bilinguals suggesting first-language transfer influencing sentence processing in English. The effects AoL2A and the length of second language experience showed no significant differences between simultaneous and sequential bilinguals or between bilingual adults and children for identifying the correct agent in each sentence. However, neuroimaging results demonstrated greater hemodynamic responses in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) in simultaneous bilinguals compared to sequential bilinguals and greater hemodynamic responses in left and right DLPFC and left IPL among bilingual adults. Different behavioral and neural hemodynamic response patterns afford new insights into the effects of syntactic knowledge on sentence processing.

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