Currently there are no standardized language assessments for English-Irish bilingual school age children that would test languages in a comparable way. There are also no standardized language assessments of Irish for this age group. The current study aimed to design comparable language assessments in both languages targeting structures known to be challenging for children with language impairments. A sentence repetition (SRep) task equivalent to the English SRep task (Marinis, Chiat, Armon-Lotem, Piper, & Roy, 2011) was designed for Irish. Twenty-four typically developing, sequential bilingual children immersed in Irish in the educational setting performed better on the English SRep task than on the Irish SRep task. Different patterns were observed in language performance across sentence types with performance on relative clauses being particularly poor in Irish. Similarly, differences were observed in error patterns with the highest number of errors of omission in Irish, and the highest number of substitution errors in English.

The authors would like to thank members of COST Action IS0804 "Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment" (www.bi-sli.org) for sharing their ideas and insights regarding LITMUS based SRep tasks. We acknowledge Theodoros Marinis for providing us with the School-Age Sentence Imitation Test-E32. We would also like to thank Sarah-Ann Muckley, Áine McKeown and Rosa Nutty who helped designing sentences for the Irish SRep task and Edward Jones who assisted in recording the sentences.Finally, we would like to thank three anonymous reviewers whose comments significantly improved the manuscript.