Assessing Lebanese bilingual children: The use of Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks in Lebanese Arabic

ABSTRACT

Since norms for vocabulary acquisition in Lebanese bilingual children (L1: Lebanese, L2: French and/or English) do not yet exist, clinical assessment based on normative data and using appropriate tools remains difficult for speech and language therapists. The current study focuses on exploring and comparing lexical performances of typically developing Lebanese bilingual children (32 Bi-TD, aged 5;7 to 6;9) and those with specific language impairment (10 Bi-SLI, aged 5;9 to 7;10), using Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT, COST Action IS0804, 2011) in Lebanese Arabic language (CLT-LB), specific to the Lebanese context. The results confirm that typically developing children have better lexical skills, especially expressive skills, than their peers with specific language impairment. Expressive and receptive performance by both groups of children was found to depend on word class (nouns and verbs). Bi-TD children were more accurate at naming and recognising verbs than the Bi-SLI group. The results of these lexical tasks reveal aspects of the nature of bilingual lexical variation, as well as similarities and differences between the Bi-TD and Bi-SLI groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Assessment
• Arabic
• bilingualism
• Lebanese children
• lexicon
• specific language impairment

Acknowledgments

This research would not have been possible without the contribution of Sabine Sarkis Ghanem. We would also like to express our gratitude to the COST Action IS0804 members, in particular Ewa Haman and Magdalena Łuniewska for their help in building the Lebanese Arabic version of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

¹ LITMUS: Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (Armon-Lotem, de Jong, & Meir, 2015).

² COST Action IS0804, “Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic patterns and the Road to Assessment”, working group on lexical and phonological processing (WG3) (http://bi-sli.org/).

³ A Mann-Whitney non-parametric test indicated a significant difference for LexR (U(42) = 17, p < 0.01, r = 0.65), CO (U(42) = 14.5, p < 0.01, r = 0.66), LexP (U(42) = 34, p < 0.01, r = 0.57), RepM (U(42) = 0, p < 0.01, r = 0.74) and ProdE (U(42) = 12.5, p < 0.01, r = 0.67).

⁴ A Mann-Whitney non-parametric test indicated a significant difference for SyntExp (U(30) = 11.5, p < 0.01, r = 0.75), SyntCO (U(30) = 41, p = 0.03, r = 0.48), ExpVoc (U(30) = 29, p < 0.01, r = 0.59), RecVoc (U(30) = 32, p < 0.01, r = 0.56) and RepM Bilo (U(30) = 3.5, p < 0.01, r = 0.82).