Longitudinal trajectories of the representation and access to phonological information in bilingual children with specific language impairment

Abstract

Purpose: Language development in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is still poorly understood, especially if children with SLI are bilingual. This study describes the longitudinal trajectory of several linguistic abilities in bilingual children with SLI relative to bilingual control children matched by their age and socioeconomic status.

Method: A set of measures of non-word repetition, sentence repetition, phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming and verbal fluency were collected at three time points, from 6–12 years of age using a prospective longitudinal design.

Result: Results revealed that, at all ages, children with SLI obtained lower values in measures of sentence repetition, non-word repetition, phonological fluency and phonological awareness (without visual cues) when compared to typically-developing children. Other measures, such as rapid automatic naming, improved over time, given that differences at 6 years of age did not persist at further moments of testing. Other linguistic measures, such as phonological awareness (with visual cues) and semantic fluency were equivalent between both groups across time.

Conclusion: Children with SLI manifest persistent difficulties in tasks involved in manipulating segments of words and in maintaining verbal units active in phonological working memory, while other abilities, such as the access to underlying phonological representations are unaffected.

Keywords:

• Specific language impairment
• phonological working memory
• phonological representations
• longitudinal

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to all the children who participated in the study and to their schools.

Declaration of interest

This work was supported by Spanish government and the ERDF: European Regional Development Fund [SEJ2006-12616] and [EDU2013-45174-P].