Abstract
The purpose of the study was to examine whether monolingual adults can identify the bilingual children with LI on the basis of children’s response speed to the examiner. Participants were 37 monolingual English-speaking young adults. Stimuli were 48 audio clips from six sequential bilingual children (48 months) who were predominately exposed to Cantonese (L1) at home from birth and started to learn English (L2) in preschool settings. The audio clips for each child were selected from an interactive story-retell task in both Cantonese and English. Three of the children were typically developing, and three were identified as having a language impairment. The monolingual adult participants were asked to judge children’s response times for each clip. Interrater reliability was high (Kalpha = 0.82 for L1; Kalpha = 0.75 for L2). Logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic curves were used to examine the diagnostic accuracy of the task. Results showed that monolingual participants were able to identify bilingual children with LI based on children’s response speed. Sensitivity and specificity were higher in Cantonese conditions compared to English conditions. The results added to the literature that children’s response speed can potentially be used, along with other measures, to identify bilingual children who are at risk for language impairment.
Highlights
Developmental language disorder (DLD) [1] affects approximately 7–11% of children [2,3]
Some studies do not find such an advantage in other processing tasks [22,24]. These findings suggest that the variability in bilingual children’s response time could be associated with their bilingual experience, and the type of tasks could affect the diagnostic accuracy of processing speed
We explored whether judging children’s response speed to adults’ prompts in narrative contexts could be used to identify slow bilingual children who might be at risk for language impairment
Summary
Developmental language disorder (DLD) [1] affects approximately 7–11% of children [2,3]. According to the processing-based accounts, the slow processing speed in children with DLD might be related to their limited ability to process linguistic information [25,26] and attention deficits [21,27]. Convergent evidence indicates that monolingual children with DLD demonstrate slower processing speed than TD monolingual children on linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks [23,25,28,29,30]. Park and colleagues [33] examined whether linguistic and nonlinguistic processing speed measures can be used as clinical markers for monolingual children with DLD. The binary logistic regression results showed that a combination of linguistic and nonlinguistic processing speed tasks moderately predict monolingual children’s DLD status. Slow processing speed appears to be more predictive of the presence of DLD, but not the absence of DLD
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