Assessment of language impairment in bilingual children using semantic tasks: two languages classify better than one

Abstract

Background Significant progress has been made in the identification of language impairment in children are bilingual. Bilingual children’s vocabulary knowledge may be distributed across languages. Thus, when testing bilingual children it is difficult to know how to weigh each language for diagnostic purposes. Even when conceptual scoring is used in vocabulary testing, bilingual children may score below that of their typical monolingual peers. Aims The primary aim was to evaluate the classification accuracy of two approaches (total semantics score and two-dimensional bilingual coordinate score) that combined lexical–semantic knowledge across two languages. We investigated the classification accuracy of the English and Spanish semantics subtest using the experimental version of the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA) with bilingual children with and without language impairment. Methods A total of 78 bilinguals with balanced exposure to English and Spanish (15 with language impairment, 63 with typical development) participated. Children were between 4;0 and 6;11 years old. Discriminant function analysis explored the extent to which these children were accurately classified when combining Spanish and English subtests. Outcomes & Results Discriminant analysis yielded above 85% correct classification for balanced bilingual children for both approaches. Conclusions & Implications For the most accurate assessment and diagnostic decision-making for bilinguals, approaches that consider both languages together are recommended.

Multilingual assessment of early child development: Analyses from repeated observations of children in Kenya

“…Child development assessments conducted in a single language may not fully reflect a multilingual child's developmental outcomes and learning trajectory (Cummins, 1979(Cummins, , 2001Peña, Bedore, & Kester, 2015). Bilingual children's conceptual vocabularies are similar in size to those of monolingual children; however, their vocabulary size in each language is smaller than that for monolingual children (Bialystok, Luk, Peets, & Yang, 2010;Hammer et al, 2014).…”

Language impairment in bilingual children

“…The development of lexical-semantic knowledge has been investigated by Altman, Goldstein, and Armon-Lotem (accepted) and Peña, Bedore, and Kester (2016). Altman et al…”

“…Altman et al reported that while the bilingual effect was significant for both receptive knowledge and expressive knowledge in both nouns and verbs, it was narrower for receptive knowledge of nouns. Peña, Bedore & Kester (2016) used the semantics subtests from the aforementioned Bilingual English Spanish Assessment and tested two approaches to the assessment of balanced Spanish-English bilingual children at risk of language impairment in terms of diagnostic accuracy. They tested 78 children (15 with language impairment) in pre-school to early school 5 years (4;0-6;11).…”

Where Spanish and English Come Together: A Two Dimensional Bilingual Approach to Clinical Decision Making

“…Conceptual scoring provides such an alternative to making a priori decisions about language of testing (Bedore, Peña, García, & Cortez, 2005; Peña, Bedore, & Kester, 2016; Pearson, Fernández, & Oller, 1993). In conceptual scoring, the child’s correct response to a test item is credited regardless of the language in which it was provided; thus the child is given an opportunity on an item-by-item basis to respond in either language.…”

“…Another approach that builds on the best of these approaches is what we have referred to as a two dimensional bilingual coordinate score (bilingual coordinate) approach to decision-making (Peña et al, 2016). In this approach, testing tasks are administered in each of a child’s languages.…”