Language impairment in bilingual children

Marinis, Theodoros; Armon-Lotem, Sharon; Pontikas, George

doi:10.1075/lab.00001.mar

Cited by 86 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…, Chiat and Polišenská , Hamann and Abed Ibrahim , Marinis et al . ), and are encouraging in that they have shown fair to excellent diagnostic accuracy. Still lacking, however, are large‐scale studies using the same methodology in different bilingual contexts, with participant samples displaying the wide range of diversity that is common in most clinical settings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

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Identifying language impairment in bilingual children in France and in Germany

Tuller

Hamann

Chilla

et al. 2018

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…and Marinis et al . ). The basic question is quite simply whether and how it can be determined that language difficulties in a bilingual child are due to SLI and not the reflex of a particular stage of typical L2 development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Identifying language impairment in bilingual children in France and in Germany

Tuller

Hamann

Chilla

et al. 2018

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

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“…A challenge constantly facing clinicians is to determine whether a bilingual child’s poor performance on language tasks in the societal language (second language-L2) is due to an inborn language impairment (LI) or to insufficient exposure to the L2 (cf. Armon-Lotem et al, 2015; Marinis et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Machine Learning Can Tell Us About the Role of Language Dominance in the Diagnostic Accuracy of German LITMUS Non-word and Sentence Repetition Tasks

Ibrahim

Fekete

2019

Front. Psychol.

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The present study investigates the performance of 21 monolingual and 56 bilingual children aged 5;6–9;0 on German LITMUS-sentence-repetition (SRT; Hamann et al., 2013) and non-word-repetition-tasks (NWRT; Grimm et al., 2014), which were constructed in accordance with the LITMUS-principles (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings; Armon-Lotem et al., 2015). Both tasks incorporate phonologically and syntactically complex structures shown to be cross-linguistically challenging for children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and aim at minimizing bias against bilingual children while still being indicative of the presence of language impairment across language combinations (see Marinis and Armon-Lotem, 2015; for sentence-repetition; Chiat, 2015 for non-word-repetition). Given the great variability in bilingual language exposure and the potential effect of language experience on language performance in bilingual children, we examined whether background variables related to bilingualism, particularly, the degree language dominance as measured by relative amount of use and exposure, could compromise the diagnostic accuracy of the German LITMUS-SRT and NWRT. We further investigated whether a combination of the two tasks provides better diagnostic accuracy and helps avoid cases of misdiagnosis. To address this, we used an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, the Partitioning-Around-Medoids (PAM, Kaufman and Rousseeuw, 2009), for deriving a clinical category for the children as ± language-impaired based on their performance scores on SRT and NWRT (in isolation and combined) while withholding information about their clinical status based on standardized assessment in their first (home language, L1) and second language (societal language, L2). Subsequently, we calculated diagnostic accuracy and used regression analysis to investigate which background variables (age of onset, length of exposure, degree of language dominance, socio-economic-status, and risk factors for SLI) best explained clinical-group-membership yielded from the PAM-analysis based on the children’s NWRT and SRT performance scores. Results show that although language-dominance clearly influences the performance of bilingual typically developing children, especially in the SRT, the diagnostic accuracy of the tools is not compromised by language dominance: while risk factors for SLI were significant predictors for clinical group membership in all models, language dominance did not contribute at all to explaining clinical cluster membership as typically developing or SLI based on any of the combinations of the SRT and NWRT variables. Additionally, results confirm that a combination of SRT scored by correct target structure and the structurally more complex language-dependent part of the NWRT yields better diagnostic accuracy than single measures and is only sensitive to risk factors for SLI and not to dominance levels or SES.

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“…Recent linguistic research on (specific) language impairment (SLI) has focused on bilingual populations because more and more children grow up bilingually and the challenges of identifying what is typical in bilingual language development and what should be considered an impairment are notorious, see ArmonLotem et al (2015) and Marinis et al (2017) for recent overviews. One such challenge is the finding that SLI may have different manifestations in different languages so that clinical markers widely differ.…”

Section: Introduction Bilingual Language Development and Language Impmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methods for Identifying Specific Language Impairment in Bilingual Populations in Germany

Hamann

Ibrahim

2017

Front. Commun.

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This study investigates the performance of 22 monolingual and 54 bilingual children with and without specific language impairment (SLI), in a non-word repetition task (NWRT) and a sentence repetition task (SRT). Both tasks were constructed according to the principles for LITMUS tools (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) developed within COST Action IS0804 and incorporated phonological or syntactic structures that are lin guistically complex and have been shown to be difficult for children with SLI across languages. For phonology these are in particular (non)words containing consonant clusters. In morphosyntax, complexity has been attributed to factors such as embedding and/or syntactic movement. Tasks focusing on such structures are expected to identify SLI in bilinguals across language combinations. This is notoriously difficult because structures that are problematic for typically developing bilinguals (BiTDs) and monolingual children with SLI (MoSLI) often overlap. We show that the NWRT and the SRT are reliable tools for identification of SLI in bilingual contexts. However, interpretation of the performance of bilingual children depends on background information as provided by parental questionnaires. To evaluate the accuracy of our tasks, we recruited children in ordinary kindergartens or schools and in speech language therapy centers and verified their status with a battery of standardized language tests, assessing bilingual children in both their languages. We consider a bilingual child language impaired if she shows impairments in two language domains in both her languages. For assessment, we used tests normed for monolinguals (with one exception) and adjusted the norms for bilingualism and for language dominance. This procedure established the following groups: 10 typical monolinguals (MoTD), 12 MoSLI, 46 BiTD, and 8 bilingual children with SLI (BiSLI). Our results show that both tasks target relevant structures: monolingual children are classified with 100% accuracy. Crucially, both our tasks distinguish BiTDs from MoSLIs and BiTDs from BiSLIs. The NWRT shows high accuracy and only minimal influence of language dominance. The SRT can be scored as "identical repetition" or as "target structure," the latter aiming for scoring the mastery of a syntactic structure, ignoring lexical and specific case or gender errors. Focusing on the latter measure, we examine individual cases of BiTDs with unexpected, low scores. We identify first-language dominance as a factor influencing performance but crucially find that testing in the home language in a heritage context might lead to unreliable classifications and that our procedure for determining the clinical group of bilinguals missed cases of selective impairments such as syntactic SLI.

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Language impairment in bilingual children

Cited by 86 publications

References 16 publications

Identifying language impairment in bilingual children in France and in Germany

Identifying language impairment in bilingual children in France and in Germany

What Machine Learning Can Tell Us About the Role of Language Dominance in the Diagnostic Accuracy of German LITMUS Non-word and Sentence Repetition Tasks

Methods for Identifying Specific Language Impairment in Bilingual Populations in Germany

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