The Contribution of Bilingualism, Parental Education, and School Characteristics to Performance on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals: Fourth Edition, Swedish

Abstract

Assessment of bilingual children in only one language fails to acknowledge their distributed linguistic competence and has been shown to overidentify language disorder in bilingual populations. However, other factors, sometimes associated with bilingualism, may also contribute to low results in language assessments. Our aim was to examine the impact of these factors on language abilities. We used the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – Fourth Edition, Swedish (CELF-4) to investigate core language abilities of 224 7- to 8-year-old children. Results showed 30 and 80% of monolinguals and bilinguals, respectively, performing more than 1 SD below the normative sample mean, calling into question the clinical utility of the test. However, participant and school characteristics provided a deeper understanding of the skewed results. In isolation, bilingualism predicted 38% of the variance in the CELF-4 Core scores. With level of parental education entered the variance explained by the model increased to 52%, but the unique contribution of bilingualism was reduced to 20%. Finally, with information added on school characteristics and enrollment in the school’s recreation center the model explained an additional two percent, with the unique contribution of bilingualism further reduced to 9%. The results indicate an increased risk for low results on the CELF-4 Core when children present with multiple risk factors. This highlights the need to look beyond bilingualism in language assessment of bilingual children and adolescents and to consider other explanations to academic struggle. Available interventions must be considered and applied proportionately to their respective impact on the individual’s development.

Identifying language disorder in bilingual children aged 2.5 years requires screening in both languages

“…Bilingual children living in segregated areas may develop their second language at a slower rate, while the development of their mother tongue tends to be less affected 24 . Bilingual school‐aged children from socio‐economically disadvantaged environments, who attended schools in these areas, displayed lower test results in their second language than bilingual children from socio‐economically advantaged environments 25 …”

Links between language and executive functions in Swedish preschool children: A pilot study

“…Economic wealth did not affect the teenagers' results on reading and literacy tasks. A study on 224 Swedish children in the ages 7-8 (Andersson et al, 2019) compared the results on CELF-4 in relation to the children's multilingualism, the parents' educational level, the child's attendance to leisure-time center, and the SES of the neighborhood (based on information from the tax agency). The results were complex but indicate that a mixture of factors-having Swedish as L2, low parental education, not attending leisure-time center, and living in a low-SES neighborhood-contributed to children's low results on CELF-4.…”

What does the Sentence Structure component of the CELF-IV index, in monolinguals and bilinguals?

“…This is at odds with the other English proficiency tests, where environmental factors are significant determinants: both cumulative exposure to English and socio-economic status have an impact on response accuracy, in exactly the same group of children. In principle, as pointed out by a reviewer, this could be explained by the fact that the effect of language exposure varies across linguistic domains and modalities (Paradis & Jia, 2017; Schulz & Grimm, 2019) and by the importance of other factors such as socio-economic disadvantage (see e.g., Andersson et al, 2019). If that interpretation is on the right track, the lack of impact of language exposure on this measure of receptive syntax might be considered a potentially positive result for the assessment of bilinguals: it would be a sign that bias has been avoided in this standardized test, in spite of it having been normed with monolinguals.…”