Clinical Neurolinguistics of Bilingualism

Linguistic Skills in Bilingual Children With Developmental Language Disorders: A Pilot Study

“…Their linguistic performance (in terms of lexical, grammatical, and narrative abilities) was assessed by administering a selection of the subtests of the BVL 4-12 ( Marini et al, 2015 ) and its adapted version to German. Overall, the results showed that: the participants with DLDs had reduced phonological short-term memory (confirmation of Hypothesis 1); that phonological memory correlated with Naming and % of Complete Sentences (confirmation of Hypothesis 2); that children with DLDs had reduced lexical skills that, in turn, likely contributed to the reduced levels of local coherence and informativeness of their narratives (partial confirmation of Hypothesis 3); and that these difficulties were found at similar levels in their two languages (in line with previous findings by Restrepo and Kruth, 2000 ; Peña et al, 2001 ; Cleave et al, 2010 ; Kohnert, 2010 ; Marini et al, 2012 ). The only exception was the production of paragrammatic errors that were language dependent in both groups (partial confirmation of Hypothesis 4).…”

“…According to the level of proficiency in their two languages, bilinguals can be dominant (if they are more fluent in one language than the other) or balanced (if they master the languages with the same proficiency) (e.g., Peal and Lambert, 1962 ). In this article we will refer to a pragmatic definition of bilingualism, namely the regular use of two (or more) languages independently from other variables such as age of acquisition or proficiency level ( Grosjean, 1992 ; Marini et al, 2012 ; Uljarević et al, 2016 ).…”

“…Bilingual children with DLDs have difficulties in both of their languages ( Restrepo and Kruth, 2000 ; Peña et al, 2001 ; Cleave et al, 2010 ; Kohnert, 2010 ; Marini et al, 2012 ; but see Jacobson and Livert, 2010 ) and learn them at a slower pace than bilingual peers with typical development ( Håkansson et al, 2003 ). Over the past 10 years, some studies have begun to investigate the linguistic performance of bilingual children with DLDs also by using procedures of narrative assessment ( Cleave et al, 2010 ; Squires et al, 2014 ; Rezzonico et al, 2015 ).…”

“…The former rely heavily on memory, whereas the latter on executive (i.e., phonological short-term and working memory, inhibition, monitoring and planning) and discourse selection and organization skills. As to this regard, Marini et al (2012) compared the linguistic skills of nine bilingual children with DLDs aged between 6 and 13 years and exposed to Friulian L1 and Italian L2. The assessment focused on lexical comprehension, sentence comprehension, sentence repetition, semantic fluency, and the ability to produce a story on a picture-description task.…”

Short version of the bilingual aphasia test in Malayalam

“…[ 1 ] In persons who speak two or more languages (i.e., bi-/multilinguals), brain damage could compromise all languages. [ 2 ] In a world that is increasingly becoming bi-/multilingual in nature due to many reasons,[ 3 ] the impact of brain injury on communication skills of such people is tremendous.…”