Background: The chosen method of speech assessment, including type of speech material, may affect speech judgement in children with cleft palate. Aim: To assess the effect of different speech materials on speech judgement in 5‐year‐old children born with or without cleft palate, as well as the reliability of materials by means of intra‐ and inter‐transcriber agreement of consonant transcriptions. Methods & Procedures: Altogether 40 children were studied, 20 born with cleft palate, 20 without. The children were audio recorded at 5 years of age. Speech materials used were: single‐word naming, sentence repetition (both developed for cleft palate speech assessment), retelling of a narrative and conversational speech. The samples were phonetically transcribed and inter‐ and intra‐transcriber agreement was calculated. Percentage correct consonants (PCC), percentage correct places (PCP), percentage correct manners (PCM), and percentage active cleft speech characteristics (CSC) were assessed. In addition, an analysis of phonological simplification processes (PSP) was performed. Outcome & Results: The PCC and CSC results were significantly more accurate in word naming than in all other speech materials in the children with cleft palate, who also achieved more accurate PCP results in word naming than in sentence repetition and conversational speech. Regarding PCM and PSP, performance was significantly more accurate in word naming than in conversational speech. Children without cleft palate did better, irrespective of the speech material. The medians of intra‐ and inter‐transcriber agreement were good in both groups and all speech materials. The closest agreement in the cleft palate group was seen in word naming and the weakest in the retelling task. Conclusion & Implications: The results indicate that word naming is the most reliable speech material when the purpose is to assess the best speech performance of a child with cleft palate. If the purpose is to assess connected speech, sentence repetition is a reliable and also valid speech material, with good transcriber agreement and equally good articulation accuracy as in retelling and conversational speech. For typically developing children without a cleft palate, the chosen speech material appears not to affect speech judgement.

Data from ten Swedish-Arabic preschool children with language impairment and ten Swedish-Arabic children with normal language development matched for age and exposure to Swedish were analyzed. Specific tasks for both Swedish and Arabic were designed. By using the hierarchy predicted by processability theory as a yardstick, grammatical development was measured in the two languages of the children. The basic assumption is that there is a developmental sequence that all language learners follow on their way toward a target language. The results show that the bilingual children with language impairment tend to have a balanced low level of language development in both languages, whereas the bilingual children with normal language development show a higher level of language development in at least one language.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are often described as having great difficulty with grammatical morphology, but most studies have focused only on these children's use of verb morphology. In this study, we examined the use of noun phrase (NP) morphology by preschool-age children with SLI who are acquiring Swedish. Relative to typically developing same-age peers and younger peers matched according to mean length of utterance, the children with SLI had greater difficulty in the use of genitive inflections, indefinite articles, and article + adjective + noun constructions. Their difficulties were evidenced in omissions as well as substitutions. Furthermore, article omissions were more frequent in NPs containing an adjective and a noun than in NPs with only a noun. These findings indicate that in languages such as Swedish, NP morphology as well as verb morphology can be quite problematic for children with SLI. Factors that might have contributed to these children's difficulties are the lack of transparency of the gender of Swedish nouns, the morphological complexity of NPs containing adjectives in Swedish, the weak syllable status of articles, and the consonantal nature of some of the inflections.

Child healthcare nurses need easily accessible information and clear guidelines on the language development of bilingual children to ensure that bilingual and monolingual children receive equitable language screening services.

A developmental perspective is important to understand the nature of LI in bilingual children. The results also have implications for the assessment of language development in bilingual children with severe LI, since a hardly perceptible development over time is observed.