Abstract
Over-identification of language disorder among bilingual children with typical development (TD) is a risk factor in assessment. One strategy for improving assessment accuracy with bilingual children is to determine which linguistic sub-domains differentiate bilingual children with TD from bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD). To date, little research on sequential bilinguals with TD and DLD has focussed on complex (multi-clausal) sentences in naturalistic production, even though this is a noted domain of weakness for school-age monolinguals with DLD. Accordingly, we sought to determine if there were differences in the use of complex sentences in conversational and narrative tasks between school-age sequential bilinguals with TD and with DLD at the early stages of L2 acquisition. We administered a conversation and a narrative task to 63 English L2 children with TD and DLD, aged 5–7 years with 2 years of exposure to the L2. Children had diverse first language backgrounds. The L2-TD and L2-DLD groups were matched for age, length of L2 exposure and general L2 proficiency (receptive vocabulary size). Language samples from both tasks were coded and analyzed for the use of complex versus simple sentences, for the distribution of complex sentence types, for clausal density and mean length of utterance (MLU). Complex sentences included coordinated clauses, sentential complement clauses, adverbial clauses and relative clauses. Using regression modelling and PERMANOVA, we found that the L2-TD group produced more complex sentences than the L2-DLD group, with coordinated clauses, adverbial clauses and relative clauses differing the most between the groups. Furthermore, the two groups differed for mean clausal density, but not for MLU, indicating that clausal density and MLU did not estimate identical morphosyntactic abilities. Individual variation in complex sentence production for L2-TD was predicted by longer L2 exposure and task; by contrast, for L2-DLD, it was predicted by older age. This study indicates that complex sentence production is an area of weakness for bilingual children with DLD, as it is for monolinguals with DLD. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed.
Highlights
Sequential bilingual children who speak a heritage first language (L1) and are in the process of acquiring the majority second language (L2) in the early school years are at risk for over-identification of language disorders (KayRaining Bird et al, 2016; Paradis et al, 2021)
We give the results of linear regression analyses testing whether group membership (L2-developmental language disorder (DLD) or L2-typical development (TD)) was significantly related to the frequency with which these different sentence types were produced
The second section addresses our second research question, which asked if there were group differences in the overall clausal density and mean length of utterance (MLU) between the L2-DLD and L2TD group when length of exposure to the L2 is taken into consideration
Summary
Sequential bilingual children who speak a heritage first language (L1) and are in the process of acquiring the majority second language (L2) in the early school years are at risk for over-identification of language disorders (KayRaining Bird et al, 2016; Paradis et al, 2021). This difference could be due to the bilinguals in Cahill et al (2020) being older and having longer exposure to English than the bilinguals in Paradis et al (2017); in other words, the expected task effects might emerge more clearly as cognitive maturity and linguistic proficiency in the language of testing increases It is unknown how task demands might affect production of complex sentences in bilinguals with DLD; we examine this in the present study. Blom and Paradis (2015) suggested that bilingual children with DLD might be less able to make effective use of their L2 input because of the verbal memory and processing limitations that most children with DLD have (e.g., Leonard, 2014) Following this line of research, we examine the influence of individual differences in age and length of L2 exposure on the children’s production of complex sentences. 4) How does individual variation in age and length of L2 exposure predict the use of complex sentences? Does the relative influence of these factors differ between groups?
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