The role of language input in typical bilingual language development : implications for the assessment of atypical bilingual language development

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Exposure to more than one language influences children's language development (Kehoe & Kannathasan, 2021). It has been shown that particularly the relative amount of language input bilingual children receive influences their language development. Bilingual children can never dedicate the same amount of time to either one of their languages as their monolingual peers because their everyday linguistic environment is divided between two languages. This may ultimately lead to typically developing bilingual children with linguistic profiles similar to monolingual children with a language developmental disorder (DLD) if they have reduced contact to one of their languages (Paradis, 2010). For this reason, it is particularly difficult for clinicians (i.e., Speech-Language Pathologists, SLPs) to distinguish between actual language impairment and typical deviations from the (monolingual) norm due to limited language exposure. In Germany, almost half of all children in speech therapy have a bilingual or multilingual language background (Lüke & Ritterfeld, 2011). Despite the high proportion of bilingual children in speech therapy, the assessment and treatment of DLD in this population is still predominantly monoculturally and monolingually oriented (Scharff Rethfeldt, 2016). Previous studies have identified nonword repetition tasks (NWRTs) as promising tools for the clinical differentiation between bilingual typically developing children and children with DLD because they are arguably relatively free from the influence of children's prior language experience (Schwob et al., 2021). However, some researchers have raised the question of whether bilingual children might still be disadvantaged by language-specific characteristics of nonwords (e.g., Chiat, 2015).