Assessment of Bilingual Children for Identification of Language Impairment: Current Findings and Implications for Practice

Abstract

Children from bilingual backgrounds are sometimes overidentified with language impairment (LI) because educators do not have appropriate developmental expectations. At other times bilingual children are underidentified because educators wait to identify difficulties while children learn the second language. In this review we discuss data on language acquisition from several sources including cross-linguistic studies of typical first language acquisition and LI in monolingual and bilingual children. Based on this literature we discuss problems with current assessment approaches. We then propose a decision-making framework for identification of bilingual children who are at risk for LI. A key feature of this proposal is the importance of clinical markers for identification of LI.

Keywords:

• assessment
• bilingual
• language impairment

Notes

1. Here we focus on language development and language impairment in bilingual children. It is important to note that there are parallel issues in differentiating typical reading development and reading impairments including dyslexia in bilinguals. Under- and overidentification of reading impairments have been reported for bilingual children (Deponio et al., 2000). In reading acquisition, cross-language differences can be attributed to differences in orthographic systems and the transparency of the phoneme–grapheme transparency. For bilingual children the pattern of transfer of reading skills can be attributed, at least in part, to the degree to which the languages being learned have comparable phoneme–grapheme correspondences (Goswami, 2000). Based on knowledge about the reading process across languages, areas of difficulty can be identified that differentiate bilingual children with reading impairment even when they have not fully acquired both of their languages (Geva, 2000). When such measures are employed bilingual children with reading impairment can be identified with high levels of accuracy (Miller Guron & Lundberg, 2003). We will discuss the same issues (over- and underidentification, cross-language and bilingual acquisition, and markers of impairment) as they relate to language impairment in bilingual children.