Assessing phonologies in bilingual Swedish-Arabic children with and without language impairment

Abstract

Ten Swedish-Arabic children with severe language impairment (LI) and 10 matched controls were tested with Swedish and Arabic phonology tests. The children with severe LI displayed significantly more of both syntagmatic and paradigmatic processes in both languages. The results are also discussed in relation to monolingual children in Swedish and Arabic, both children with a normal language development as well as with a language impairment. Both groups of Swedish-Arabic children tended to develop their two languages in the same way as monolingual children in each language, with some exceptions. Both groups had substantial lexical problems, especially in Arabic. Exposure to Swedish was an important variable relative to number of syntagmatic processes. The importance of assessing both languages is emphasized.