Using a monolingual screening test for assessing bilingual children

ABSTRACT

Bilingual language development is different from monolingual language development. The lack of appropriate assessment tools geared to the bilingual population has led to inaccurate over-diagnosis of bilingual children with typical language development (TLD) as children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and under-diagnosis of bilingual children with DLD. The present paper addresses this challenge by focusing on Hebrew as a second language (L2) of bilingual preschool children whose first language (L1) is either English or Russian, taking into consideration both chronological age (CA) and age of onset of bilingualism (AOB). This study aimed to generate bilingual standards for a monolingual screening test, Goralnik Screening Test for Hebrewby arriving at appropriate bilingual typical development cut-off points. A total of 443 bilingual Hebrew speaking children (397 with TLD and 46 with DLD), ages 61–78 months (M = 70; SD = 4), 199 with L1 English and 244 with L1 Russian, took part in the study. The results demonstrate low diagnostic accuracy when a monolingual test with monolingual norms is used for bilingual children, in contrast with increased diagnostic accuracy when bilingual standards are used for bilingual children. The paper concludes by showing the importance of bilingual standards when assessing clinical populations with varying ages of acquisition, and in particular, for those who were exposed to their second language after the age of four.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual language development
• language assessment
• bilingual standards
• Goralnik Screening Test for Hebrew
• age of bilingual onset

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Esti Goralnik, for allowing us to use the Goralnik Hebrew Screening Test for data collection. We are grateful to the Ministry of Education and its supervisors, the staff in the preschools, the parents who gave consent for their children to participate, and to the children themselves who took part in this study. The study was supported by THE ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (ISF 938/03, ISF 779, ISF 863/14/10, ISF 1716/19), the German Ministry of Education (BMBF Grant 01UW0702B) and the German-Israel Foundation (GIF 1113/2010).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung- BMBF [01UW0702B,01UWO702B]; German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development [1113/2010,113/2010]; Israel Science Foundation [1716/19,779/10,863/14,938/03,ISF 938/03].