Abstract
The Cross-linguistic Lexical Task (CLT; Haman, Łuniewska & Pomiechowska, 2015) is a vocabulary task designed to enable cross-linguistic comparisons both across and within (bilingual) children. In this paper we assessed the validity of the CLT as a measure of language proficiency in bilingual children, by determining the extent to which (i) age-matched, monolingual Spanish-speaking and Dutch-speaking children obtained similar scores, (ii) the CLT correlated with other measures of language proficiency in monolingual and bilingual children, and (iii) whether the factors underlying the CLT's construction, i.e., target words' estimated Age of Acquisition and Complexity Index, were predictive of children's scores. Our results showed that, while the CLT correlated with other measures and is therefore a valid means of tapping into language proficiency, caution is required when using it to compare children's language proficiency cross-linguistically, as scores for Dutch-speaking and Spanish-speaking monolinguals sometimes differed.
Highlights
A complete understanding of a bilingual child’s linguistic development requires examining their skills in both languages
Measuring children’s proficiency in both languages is crucial for accurate diagnoses regarding language impairment to be made. Both underdiagnosis and overdiagnosis of language impairment are reported in the literature (Boerma, Chiat, Leseman, Timmermeister, Wijnen & Blom, 2015), indicating that language impairment is either overlooked – because language delays in the language of schooling are mistakenly ascribed to the child’s bilingual status – or that bilingual children are erroneously diagnosed with language impairment because their proficiency in the other language has not been taken into account
When we divide the data into three different age groups (4–5 year-olds, 6–7 year-olds, and 8–9 year olds), we found that the differences between the two monolingual groups for the production subtask were almost entirely driven by the youngest age group, with the Spanish-speaking children scoring 12.1% higher than the Dutch-speaking children, whereas there were no significant differences for the older age groups
Summary
A complete understanding of a bilingual child’s linguistic development requires examining their skills in both languages. It is arguably essential to do so. Measuring children’s proficiency in both languages is crucial for accurate diagnoses regarding language impairment to be made. Both underdiagnosis and overdiagnosis of language impairment are reported in the literature (Boerma, Chiat, Leseman, Timmermeister, Wijnen & Blom, 2015), indicating that language impairment is either overlooked – because language delays in the language of schooling are mistakenly ascribed to the child’s bilingual status – or that bilingual children are erroneously diagnosed with language impairment because their proficiency in the other language has not been taken into account
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