Studying language development of bilingual children with the use of Sentence Repeat Exercise. Project on methodology

Abstract

The aim of the presented research project is to empirically compare the procedures of the Sentence Repetition Task in Polish. The Sentence Repetition Task is designed to study the grammatical development of bilingual children. It has been shown to be a good indicator of language difficulties across languages. When performing the task, the child hears a sentence that had been pre-recorded or that is spoken aloud by the researcher and is then asked to repeat it. The presented sentences should be long enough so that they will not be simply remembered and repeated without understanding. The rationale for using Sentence Repeat Tasks is that in order to repeat a sentence, the child must first decode its meaning, interpret it, and then process the sentence and recreate it using long-term memory, which would not be possible without access to grammatical structures reflected in the given sentence. Sentence Repetition Tasks use a wide range of language processing skills. To reproduce a sentence of medium or long length, one needs to know not only the vocabulary but also the grammar. Interestingly, Sentence Repetition Tasks, although used under the same name, differ in the way they are used by researchers in various countries.