Language assessment of monolingual and multilingual children using non-word and sentence repetition tasks

A review of questionnaires quantifying bilingual experience in children: Do they document the same constructs?

“…Looking at the way in which the age/periods of exposure to languages are operationalised in relation to interlocutors and contexts, we observe diverse levels of granularity. A large set of questionnaires asked about the length of exposure (across different interlocutors or contexts) from a specific age, which is either pre-specified or to be determined by the informant (Antonijevic-Elliott, n.d.; Antonijevic-Elliott, Lyons, O’ Malley, Meir, Haman, Banasik, Carroll, McMenamin, Rodden & Fitzmaurice, 2020; Scharff-Rethfeldt, 2012a; Arredondo, 2017; Gagarina, Klassert & Topaj [questionnaires for preschool and school children], 2010; Prentza, Kaltsa, Tsimpli & Papadopoulou [questionnaires for children and parents], 2017; De Houwer, 2002; Byers-Heinlein, Schott, Gonzalez-Barrero, Brouillard, Dubé, Laoun-Rubsenstein, Morin-Lessard, Mastroberardino, Jardak, Pour Iliaei, Salama-Siroishka & Tamayo, 2019b; Blumenthal & Julien, 2000; de Diego-Lázaro, 2019). Another set of questionnaires documented language experience separately for each year of life, with the important difference that the number of years varies across the questionnaires (first eight years of life in Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein & Bedore [BESA:BIOS, Parent], 2018; every year until the child's age at time of testing in Unsworth, 2013; three years of preschool and five years of primary school in Cohen, 2015a).…”

“…Questions about early exposure mostly differed in terms of the point in the child's life until which the questionnaire documents information: for instance, before the age of 4 (e.g., DeAnda et al, 2016;Tuller, 2015), before preschool (e.g., Gagarina et al [questionnaires for preschool and school children], 2010), within the first two years (e.g., Scharff-Rethfeldt, 2012a), until the age of eight (e.g., Gutierrez-Clellen & Kreiter [parent questionnaire], 2003), etc. Changes in exposure were also documented in a variety of ways, such as changes over the years in the languages used by the adults or children in the household (e.g., Antonijevic-Elliott et al, 2020), changes in language situation before entry into preschool (e.g., Gagarina et al [questionnaires for preschool and school children], 2010), or languages that the child does not hear or need anymore (e.g., Scharff-Rethfeldt, 2012a).…”

Preliminary Findings on a Newly Developed Malaysian Multilingual Sentence Repetition Task for Multilingual Chinese Children in Malaysia

“…This is in line with bilingual SR studies tasks which recommended having comparable versions in both/all languages involved when assessing multilingual children. 9 In terms of complexity, participants were most successful in repeating sentence structures at complexity levels 1, 2 and least successful at level 3 in English and Mandarin. This was not surprising as previous research have indicated certain structures are acquired later by monolingual and multilingual Chinese children such as the relative clause structure.…”

“…The task consists of comprehension and production processes involving phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic representation as well as the capacity to store and retrieve linguistic material from memory. 9 SR has been extensively described as a useful tool in identifying language processing abilities and weaknesses. 8,[11][12][13] SRs are widely used clinically in identifying children with language difficulties, in particular children with developmental language disorder (DLD).…”

“…This is evidenced by the risks of both over-and under-identification of language disorders in multilingual children. 9,10 Many children who might be at risk of developmental language disorder (DLD) in Malaysia were left undetected and untreated due to the unavailability of tests to diagnose DLD. 5 Currently, there are no…”