The joint effects of bilingualism, DLD and item frequency on children's lexical‐retrieval performance

Abstract

Background Bilingual children and children diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD) are characterized by reduced lexical‐retrieval abilities. Few studies examined their joint contribution and the mechanisms underlying these effects in the lexical domain. Aims To explore the joint effects of bilingualism and DLD by adopting a four‐group comparison in which the difference between bi‐ and monolingual children with DLD is directly compared with that of bi‐ and monolingual children with typical language development (TLD). In addition, to examine the mechanisms underlying the effects of bilingualism and DLD on children's lexical‐retrieval abilities, we tested how item's characteristics (frequency of use) modulate the effects of bilingualism and DLD. Methods & Procedures Fifty‐eight children (aged 9–14 years) participated in the current study. They were either Hebrew monolingual or Hebrew–English bilinguals and were either diagnosed with DLD or had TLD. Children completed a Hebrew picture‐naming task and verbal short‐term memory tests. The influence of participants’ characteristics, including bilingualism, DLD and verbal short‐term memory, as well as item's characteristics (frequency of use) were tested. Outcomes & Results Accuracy analysis revealed that bilingual children scored lower than monolingual children and that children with DLD scored lower than children with TLD. Critically, the two factors interacted such that their joint presence resulted in less‐than‐additive effects. Specifically, although bilingual children with DLD performed worse than all other groups, they performed better than expected under an additive model. Interestingly, monolingual children with DLD performed similarly to bilingual children with TLD. Increased verbal short‐term memory was associated with better performance across the four groups. Finally, bilingualism and DLD interacted with item frequency, such that being bilingual, having DLD, or both, resulted in increased sensitivity to item frequency manifested in exceptionally lower performance on low‐frequency items. Conclusions & Implications The findings suggest that the strength of linguistic representations contribute to the effects of bilingualism and DLD. Further, the presence of bilingualism in the context of DLD does not exaggerate the impact of DLD. Clinically, this suggests that differences between bi‐ and monolingual children with DLD must be considered in reference to the gap in lexical‐retrieval performance observed between bi‐ and monolingual children with TLD. Finally, because monolingual children with DLD and bilingual children with TLD performed similarly, sensitive diagnostic tools and intervention programmes should be adopted to allow correct identification and treatment of bilingual children with DLD.

Referential expressions in monolingual and bilingual children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): A study of informativeness and definiteness

“…Note that Russian and Hebrew are similar in the language-specific property of referential choice, i.e., the use of overt and null pronouns. The findings of these two studies are in accord with previous research on bilingual children with special needs, e.g., Developmental Language Disorders (DLD, previously referred to as Specific Language Impairment (SLI)) (e.g., Bird, Genesee & Verhoeven, 2016;Blom & Boerma, 2017;Degani, Kreiser & Novogrodsky, 2019;Meir, 2017;Zebib, Tuller, Hamann, Abed Ibrahim & Prévost, 2020). These studies found no detrimental effect of bilingualism on language development in children with developmental disorders.…”

Influences of bilingualism and developmental language disorder on how children learn and process words.

“…With respect to lexical retrieval, both children with DLD and bilingual children are expected to show difficulties in lexical retrieval. Further, based on the results of Degani et al (2019) utilizing a similar four-group design, we expect that bilingualism would not exaggerate the difficulty in lexical retrieval stemming from DLD. Thus, main effects of bilingualism and of DLD are predicted.…”

“Did I Say Cherry ?” Error Patterns on a Blocked Cyclic Naming Task for Bilingual Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

“…Picture naming tasks have been used to explore accuracy and error types for bilingual children with and without DLD. TD bilingual children (e.g., Gross, Buac, & Kaushanskaya, 2014) and their peers with DLD (Degani, Kreiser, & Novogrodsky, 2019) have poorer accuracy on a variety of single-word picture-naming naming tasks in comparison to TD monolingual children. Monolingual children with DLD produce more and a greater variety of error types than their TD peers, including more semantic (Lahey & Edwards, 1999;McGregor, 1997) and phonological errors (Lahey & Edwards, 1999;Sheng & McGregor, 2010).…”