Bilingualism and Processing Speed in Typically Developing Children and Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Abstract

Purpose The aim of the current study was to investigate whether dual language experience modulates processing speed in typically developing (TD) children and in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). We also examined whether processing speed predicted vocabulary and sentence-level abilities in receptive and expressive modalities. Method We examined processing speed in monolingual and bilingual school-age children (ages 8–12 years) with and without DLD. TD children (35 monolinguals, 24 bilinguals) and children with DLD (17 monolinguals, 10 bilinguals) completed a visual choice reaction time task. The Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, and the Expressive Vocabulary Test were used as language measures. Results The children with DLD exhibited slower response times relative to TD children. Response time was not modified by bilingual experience, neither in children with typical development nor children with DLD. Also, we found that faster processing speed was related to higher language abilities, but this relationship was not significant when socioeconomic status was controlled for. The magnitude of the association did not differ between the monolingual and bilingual groups across the language measures. Conclusions Slower processing speed is related to lower language abilities in children. Processing speed is minimally influenced by dual language experience, at least within this age range. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12210311

Non‐linguistic cognitive measures as predictors of functionally defined developmental language disorder in monolingual and bilingual children

“…Notably, the processing speed task enhanced the precision of predicting fDLD status in the monolingual group only. This supports the notion that monolingual children with DLD are poorer at processing information relative to TD children (Kohnert and Windsor 2004, Miller et al, 2001, Park et al, 2020. Given that processing speed is not malleable with respect to bilingual experience (Park et al, 2020), we expected that processing speed would likewise improve the prediction of fDLD status in bilinguals.…”

“…Thus, limitations in processing speed may explain language difficulties in individuals with DLD (Leonard 2014). This hypothesis is supported by empirical findings that children with DLD exhibit slow processing speed (Kohnert and Windsor 2004; Miller et al., 2001) and, likewise, slow processing speed is negatively associated with language abilities (Park et al., 2020). Moreover, longitudinal studies suggest that early processing speed predicts later language abilities with respect to vocabulary (Fernald et al., 2006) and syntax (Peter et al., 2019).…”

“…This study included sixty‐six 8–12‐year‐old children: 14 monolingual TD (MO‐TD), 12 bilingual TD (BI‐TD), 28 monolinguals with fDLD (MO‐fDLD) and 12 bilinguals with fDLD (BI‐fDLD). These children were a subset of a larger project investigating procedural learning (Park et al., 2018), attention (Park et al., 2019), processing speed (Park et al., 2020) and motor abilities (Sanjeevan and Mainela‐Arnold 2019). Age did not differ among the four groups (MO‐TD, BI‐TD, MO‐fDLD, BI‐fDLD), F (3, 62) = 0.82, p = 0.489.…”

“…We considered procedural learning, executive attention and processing speed. These abilities differ between children with DLD and TD children, but are minimally influenced by bilingual status (Park et al., 2018, 2019, 2020).…”

A Research on Developmental Characteristics of Children With Language Delay in Zhejiang Province, China

“…Language delay will not only seriously affect children's language comprehension and expression abilities, but also affect their social adaptability, cognitive ability, communicative ability, and other behavioral developments to a certain extent. Later in their life, children often face many difficulties in cognition, reading, writing and calculation, which seriously affect their neuropsychological development (3)(4)(5). Consequently, there is a great need for guidelines to deal with this prevalent problem (6).…”