Educational equality and the reduction of discrimination are among the UN’s Sustainability Goals. Previous studies as well as policy recommendations suggest that the extent to which these are implemented in the field of speech and language therapy for multilingual children depends on sufficient knowledge and material. To this end, an online survey was carried out with 300 Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs) from Austria, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, investigating their attitudes and approaches regarding the service provision for multilingual children. Their responses were analyzed taking the SLTs’ language background, experience, and country of origin into account. Results were interpreted in the context of country-specific SLT service-related policies and SLT training as well as migration history. There seems to be a gap between the SLTs’ knowledge about the specific requirements for providing Speech Language Therapy (SLT) for multilingual children and their common practice, which—despite the continuous need of further training—points to sufficient awareness but a lack of materials or resources. We found experience in working with multilingual children to be the most influential factor on attitudes and approaches towards multilingualism. This suggests the importance of improving pre-exam and early-career professional experience to foster SLTs’ development of mindful attitudes and appropriate approaches towards multilingualism in their clinical practice.
Ideally, language and reading skills in bilingual children are assessed in both languages spoken in order to avoid misdiagnoses of communication or learning disorders. Due to limited capacity of clinical and educational staff, computerized screenings that allow for automatic evaluation of the children’s performance on reading tasks (accuracy and speed) might pose a useful alternative in clinical and school settings. In this study, a novel web-based screening platform for language and reading assessment is presented. This tool has been preliminarily validated with monolingual Italian, Mandarin–Italian and English–Italian speaking primary school children living and schooled in Italy. Their performances in the screening tasks in Italian and—if bilingual—in their native language were compared to the results of standardized/conventional reading assessment tests as well as parental and teacher questionnaires. Correlations revealed the tasks that best contributed to the identification of risk for the presence of reading disorders and showed the general feasibility and usefulness of the computerized screening. In a further step, both screening administrators (Examiners) and child participants (Examinees) were invited to participate in usability studies, which revealed general satisfaction and provided suggestions for further improvement of the screening platform. Based on these findings, the potential of the novel web-based screening platform is discussed.
In bi- and monolingual children, nonword repetition tasks (NWRTs) differentiate between typically developing (TD) and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Language specificity is a crucial factor in nonword construction especially for multilingual children. While language-specific nonwords seem less artificial than non-specific nonwords, the application of language-specific phonemes may be less suitable for bilingual children who are exposed to the target language less than monolingual peers. This study evaluates the concurrent and predictive value of a novel, computerized NWRT implemented in the MuLiMi web-platform and its potential in the discrimination of bilingual children with and without DLD, investigating the role of nonwords’ language specificity. Thirty-seven children (of whom 17 had an objective risk of phonological disorders) with at least one Italian-speaking parent, living and attending kindergartens in Germany were tested with the MuLiMi NWRT and German standardized language tests. Caregivers and kindergarten teachers filled in questionnaires. Fourteen of the children were re-tested after 8–12 months. The results suggest that the new test’s concurrent and discriminative validity are good. Analysis of variance revealed highly significant differences between children with and without (an objective risk of) phonological disorders and a significant interaction between nonword specificity and risk group. Significant correlations of initial scores with follow-up scores collected after 8–12 months were also found, as well as correlations with improvements in language abilities. In conclusion, although both language-specific and language-non-specific nonword repetition can support DLD risk identification in bilingual children, language-specific stimuli appear to be particularly sensitive indicators. This is interpreted as confirming DLD children’s reduced sensitivity to frequent, familiar characteristics of the linguistic stimuli. The test’s discriminative and concurrent validity showed to be robust to various potentially influencing factors like patterns of language exposure.
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