Sentence repetition as a measure of morphosyntax in monolingual and bilingual children

Abstract

Bilingual children are frequently misdiagnosed as having Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Misdiagnosis may be minimized by tests with high degrees of sensitivity and specificity. The current study used a new test, the School-Age Sentence Imitation Test-English 32 (SASIT-E32), to investigate sentence repetition in monolingual and bilingual children, and specifically to compare overall repetition accuracy and error patterns in the two groups. Eighteen English-speaking monolingual children (mean age = 8;8) and 18 Farsi-English bilingual children (8;2) participated. Monolingual children repeated sentences more accurately than bilingual children, but, once receptive vocabulary scores were taken into account, this group difference disappeared. However, the groups demonstrated a different pattern of errors, with the bilingual group producing a higher proportion of substitution and addition errors on function words compared to content words. The main error expected from children with SLI according to the existing literature, i.e. the omission of function words, did not characterize the bilingual children's performance. We therefore propose that the SASIT-E32 might prove to be a valuable tool in identifying SLI in bilingual children.

Keywords:

• multilingualism
• language measurement
• morphology
• syntax

Acknowledgements

The present study was done as part of the first author's dissertation for the MSc in Speech and Language Therapy, City University London. We would like to thank Shula Chiat for her help and support and the second rater Mia Travlos. We also thank all the schools and families who participated in the study. Finally, we are very grateful to two anonymous reviewers, and the editors Nicole Müller and Alice Lee, for their very helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.

Declaration of Interest. The authors report no declarations of interest.