Boerma, T. & Blom, E. (2017). Assessment of bilingual children: what if testing both languages is not possible?

Journal of Communication
Disorders, 66, 65-76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomdis.2017.04.001

Assessing bilingual children – what if testing both languages is not possible?

What this research was about and why it is important
When bilingual children are delayed in their language development, this can either be due to a language impairment (LI)
or because they do not get enough exposure to one of their languages. Assessing bilingual children with tests that have
been developed on the basis of monolingual norms can lead to over- and under-diagnosis of bilingual children. As a result,
typically developing bilingual children might be stigmatised as having LI. And bilingual children with LI might not get the
help they need. It is therefore recommended that bilingual children be assessed in both their languages. Sometimes this is
not possible and practitioners need another way to assess the language skills of bilingual children. This study presented a
new approach to assessing bilingual children in just one language. The researchers studied the effects of LI and
bilingualism on risks associated with a child’s early language development and the prevalence of language problems in the
family, as reported by parents. Then they looked at how well these factors predicted whether or not a child had LI. They
combined this assessment with children’s results on a nonword repetition test and a narrative test to assess children’s
language development. These tests are less biased toward bilingual language development than tests of grammar or
vocabulary because they rely less on exposure to the target language. They also distinguish well between monolingual
children with and without LI. The researchers found that parental responses on the questionnaire together with the two
tests predicted very well whether or not bilingual children had a language disorder.

What the researchers did

• Participants were four groups of 5 and 6 year old children (33 children in each group). Participants were monolingual
and bilingual children with and without language impairment.
• The researchers interviewed parents about their children’s language development. These interviews were based on the
Questionnaire for Parents of Bilingual Children (PaBiQ). It contained questions about risk factors for LI (e.g.: late
first words and a family history of LI) and how much a child was exposed to each of his/her two languages.
• Children completed a nonword repetition test (Quasi-Universal Nonword Repetition Task – Q-U NWRT). In this test,
they had to repeat nonsense words that contained sounds which are present in many languages but do not have any
meaning. This tested how many syllables children could remember and repeat correctly. Children with LI tend to find
it difficult to remember longer nonsense words.
• Children completed a narrative test (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives – MAIN). They first heard a
model story and then had to answer ten comprehension questions. Then they had to tell their own story based on a
different set of pictures without a prompt.

What the researchers found

• Parents of children with LI were more concerned about their language development than parents of typically
developing children.
• Early language development was a better indicator of LI than a family history in monolingual and bilingual groups.
• 97% of bilingual children with and without LI could be diagnosed correctly when performance on the Q-U NWRT and
the narrative tasks was combined with responses to the PaBiQ.

Things to consider
• This study showed that the combination of a parental questionnaire, a nonword repetition task and a narrative task
could distinguish reliably between bilingual children with and without LI even if only one language was assessed.
This is an important finding for practitioners who only know one of the languages a child speaks.
• Family history, as reported by parents, did not differentiate between bilingual children with and without LI,
whereas it did between monolinguals with and without LI. Future research is needed to investigate whether cultural
factors play a role in parental report on family history.

How to cite this summary: Müller, L-M. Boerma, T. & Blom, E. (2018). Assessing bilingual children – what if testing both languages is not
possible?. OASIS Summary of Boerma & Blom (2017) in Journal of Communication Disorders. https://oasis-database.org
This summary has a CC BY-NC-SA license.