This study confirms the hypothesis that measures of narrative macro-structure are not biased against children who have less experience with a particular language, like bilinguals. In addition, it indicates that using narratives to assess children's language abilities can support the identification of LI in both a monolingual and a bilingual context.

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link AbstractPurpose This study evaluated a newly developed quasi-universal nonword repetition task (Q-U NWRT) as a diagnostic tool for bilingual children with language impairment (LI) who have Dutch as a second language. The Q-U NWRT was designed to be minimally influenced by knowledge of one specific language, in contrast to a language-specific (L-S) NWRT to which it was compared.Methods 120 monolingual and bilingual children with and without LI participated (30 per group). A mixed-design ANOVA was used to investigate the effects of LI and bilingualism on the NWRTs. Receiver Operating Characteristic analyses were conducted to evaluate the instruments' diagnostic value.Results Large negative effects of LI were found on both NWRTs, whereas negative effects of bilingualism only occurred on the L-S NWRT. Both instruments had high clinical accuracy in the monolingual group, but only the Q-U NWRT had high clinical accuracy in the bilingual group.Conclusions This study indicates that the Q-U NWRT is a promising diagnostic tool to help identify LI in bilingual children learning Dutch as a second language. The instrument was clinically accurate in both a monolingual and bilingual group of children and seems better able to disentangle language impairment from language disadvantage than more languagespecific measures.3

Various studies have shown that bilingual children score lower than their monolingual peers on standardized receptive vocabulary tests. This study investigates if this effect is moderated by language distance. Dutch receptive vocabulary was tested with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). The impact of cross-language distance was examined by comparing bilingual groups with a small (Close; n = 165) and a large between-language distance (Distant; n = 108) with monolingual controls (n = 39). As a group, the bilinguals scored lower on Dutch receptive vocabulary than the monolinguals. The bilingual Distant

With an eye toward measuring the strength of foreign accents in American English, we evaluate the suitability of a modified version of the Levenshtein distance for comparing (the phonetic transcriptions of) accented pronunciations. Although this measure has been used successfully inter alia to study the differences among dialect pronunciations, it has not been applied to studying foreign accents. Here, we use it to compare the pronunciation of non-native English speakers to native American English speech. Our results indicate that the Levenshtein distance is a valid native-likeness measurement, as it correlates strongly (r = -0.81) with the average “native-like” judgments given by more than 1000 native American English raters.

Previous research has shown that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tasks testing cognitive control. Bilinguals' enhanced cognitive control is thought to be caused by the necessity to exert more language control in bilingual compared to monolingual settings. Surprisingly, between-group research of cognitive effects of bilingualism is hardly ever combined with within-group research that investigates relationships between language control and cognitive control. The present study compared 27 monolingual Dutch and 27 bilingual Turkish-Dutch children matched on age and fluid intelligence on their performance in a nonverbal switching task. Within the group of bilinguals, the relationship between nonverbal switching and language switching was examined. The results revealed no between-group differences on nonverbal switching. Within the bilingual sample, response times in the language switching and nonverbal switching tasks were related, although no relationships were found between accuracy, switching cost and mixing cost on both tasks. The results support the hypothesis that children utilize domain-general cognitive control in language switching, but this relationship does not entail that bilinguals have better cognitive control than monolinguals.

Chapter 2 Lexical access in Turkish and Moroccan child heritage speakers in the Netherlands Chapter 3 Accuracy and fluency in the language production of monolingual and bilingual children: effects of bilingualism, language proficiency and memory Chapter 4 No bilingual benefits despite relations between language switching and task switching Chapter 5 General discussion References

No abstract