Methods for Identifying Specific Language Impairment in Bilingual Populations in Germany

Abstract

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.

Identifying language impairment in bilingual children in France and in Germany

“…, Armon‐Lotem and Meir , Boerma et al . , Chiat and Polišenská , Hamann and Abed Ibrahim , Marinis et al . ), and are encouraging in that they have shown fair to excellent diagnostic accuracy.…”

“…An alternative coding procedure was also used, target structure , for whether the sentence preserves the syntactic construction targeted, which disregards repetition errors that do not affect the structure of the stimulus sentences (e.g., lexical errors) (Fleckstein et al . ; Abed Ibrahim and Hamann ; Hamann and Abed Ibrahim ).…”

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

“…Not to mention that evaluation in two languages is time-consuming and that some of the immigrant L1 varieties undergo language change as a result of contact with the majority/societal language (L2), e.g., Immigrant Turkish in Germany (see Schroeder and Dollnick, 2013; Chilla and Şan, 2017). Hamann and Abed Ibrahim (2017) showed that even when dominance-adjusted bilingual cut-off criteria (Thordardottir, 2015) were applied to the standardized L1 tests, more than a quarter of the L1-dominant children in their sample were classified as SLI by the L1-tests. The fact that the latter children performed within aged-expectations on the L2-tests albeit being dominant in their heritage language questions the applicability of L1 tests in heritage contexts (even with norm adjustments) and suggests that direct assessment measures in the L2 are more reliable for identifying LI in bilingual populations, especially in case of heritage language speakers.…”

“…It has been recently shown that SRTs eliciting structures involving the latter operations can be reliably used to tease apart typically developing bilingual children from monolingual and bilingual children with SLI, not only in bilingual but also in bialectal settings (e.g., Armon-Lotem and Meir, 2016; Meir et al, 2016, 2017 for LITMUS-SRT in Russian and Hebrew; de Almeida et al, 2017; Fleckstein et al, 2018 for French; Lein et al, 2016; Abed Ibrahim and Hamann, 2017; Hamann et al, 2017; Hamann and Abed Ibrahim, 2017 for German; Theodorou et al (2017) for Cypriot-Greek; see also Marinis et al, 2017 for an overview). In particular, Armon-Lotem and Meir (2016) showed that although the highest level of diagnostic accuracy can be achieved using a combination of SRTs in the child’s L1/Russian and L2/Hebrew (applying bilingual cut-offs), good diagnostic accuracy can still be achieved if SRT is only administered in the societal language (L2-Hebrew).…”

Mehrsprachigkeit und umschriebene Sprachentwicklungsstörungen (USES) – Methoden der Diagnostik in der Zweitsprache Deutsch

“…[16]. Besonders wichtig ist die Erkenntnis, dass die Testergebnisse des NWRT nur bedingt von der Sprachdominanz beeinflusst werden, sodass Kinder, die in ihrer nicht dominanten Sprache Deutsch getestet werden, nicht stärker benachteiligt werden als Kinder, bei denen Deutsch die dominante Sprache ist [17].…”