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ABSTRACT
Identifying specific language impairment (SLI) in bilingual children represents a clinical challenge because of similarities in language behavior between child second language learners and monolinguals with SLI and because of the lack of standardized language tests on bilingual children. This study investigated the relevance of a LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) sentence repetition (SR) task based on language properties difficult for French-speaking children with SLI for the diagnosis of language impairment in bilinguals. The task was administered to 47 bilingual children aged 5;02 to 8;09, 35 with typical development (TD) and 12 with SLI, and to 50 monolingual controls (37 with TD and 13 with SLI). Percentage of identical repetition significantly distinguished between children with SLI and children with TD in both bilinguals and monolinguals and on all structure types. Moreover, no correlations were found between factors of bilingual development, such as age of onset, length of exposure, and quantity and quality of input, and the low repetition rates of the bilingual children with SLI, suggesting that the LITMUS-SR-French task can be used as an efficient diagnosis tool in bilinguals.
Acknowledgments
We thank all the speech-language therapists, teachers, and school principals who collaborated with us and, of course, the children and the parents who participated in this study. We also thank Dr. Marie-Anne Barthez, from the Language Reference Center at the Regional University Hospital of Tours, for her assistance in recruiting children with SLI.
Funding
This study was funded in part by a Franco-German grant (ANR-12-FRAL-0014-01 to Laurice Tuller for the French part) to which we are grateful.
Notes
1 Few differences in error patterns and use of avoidance strategies have been reported between the two populations (Håkansson Citation2001; Paradis Citation2004; Paradis & Crago Citation2000; Scheidnes Citation2012). Further efforts should be deployed for the identification of different language behaviors in bilinguals and in children with SLI, which would have important implications at both the clinical and theoretical levels.
2 The standardized language tests used to assess the bilingual children were: (i) for French, BILO (Khomsi, Khomsi & Pasquet Citation2007) and N-EEL (Chevrie-Muller & Plaza Citation2001); (ii) for Arabic, ELO-L(ebanese) (Zebib, Khomsi, Henri, Messarra & Kouba Hreich Citationin press), which was adapted to different varieties of Arabic (Algerian, Tunisian, Morrocan, and Libyan Arabic); (iii) for English, different subtests of CELF-4 (Semel et al. Citation2003) (note that phonology was not assessed via this battery).