Monolingualism is not a cure for DLD

So, this is about the 5th time that this question has come up in the last 7 days! And it’s variations of:

• Wouldn’t it be better for a bilingual child with DLD to be in English only?
• But, language is so hard, isn’t bilingualism harder for children with DLD?
• Would we see more progress if we focused only on one language?

The answer to this and other variants of the question is NO!

NO, NO NO NO NO NO!

I don’t think I can say it enough. And what’s infuriating about this is that it’s usually someone who, hasn’t studied bilingualism, or isn’t bilingual (often both), and they can’t just accept that it’s not the way to go. They pose more scenarios (not based on their expertise or the literature, or on much of anything, but on their own intuition).

But, the research is pretty clear. Doing intervention in two languages doesn’t slow down acquisition of English. Bilingual education, doesn’t slow down English language learning. Kids with DLD who are bilingual struggle not because of bilingualism but because of their DLD. Language is hard– one language is hard, two languages are hard. But (and here’s the point) if you NEED two languages to communicate, to connect with the people in your life, you need two languages. And it won’t slow you down any more than DLD will. And it gives you more people to talk to and that’s a good thing.

Research? Yes, Plenty of it!

Here’s a new paper that’s very cool– this was a group of young children with Down syndrome. Researchers looked at the amount of exposure they had to Welsh and English. They found that their English growth was not affected by exposure to Welsh.

Here’s another paper that I was the lead on. We studied just under 600 Spanish-English bilinguals; 100 with DLD at different levels of exposure to English and Spanish. We found that if we looked at kids in their better language (at the individual level) there were no effects of exposure to the other language. This was true for DLD and typical groups. The kids with DLD scored lower on morphosyntax and semantics measures than the typical kids– as expected. But, they did not score lower than their monolingual counterparts with DLD (and just think, they can talk to more people).

In an another paper found here, we tested about 1000 bilingual kids. We looked at how many kids fell into the lowest quartile of performance indicating risk for DLD. Comparing by level of exposure there were no differences by group, so we concluded that bilingualism does not pose an added risk for poor performance (when you test in both languages). In fact the group that had been bilingual the longest had a tiny bit LESS risk. Bilingualism is good for you.

In this paper, researchers found that a monolingual English vocabulary intervention vs. a bilingual (Spanish-English) vocabulary intervention resulted in no posttest differences for English. Though the bilingual vocabulary intervention also supported Spanish.

There are more papers, and many of them are in this blog– look around. But, stop it with this nonsense. Please!

How nonverbal are nonverbal IQ tasks?

I think we sometimes ASSUME that nonverbal tasks are nonverbal in the same way. And you know what happens when we assume right?? This is true for IQ tests that test nonverbal abilities. We have to ask what kinds of abilities? How are these tested? How are they elicited? And, how are they observed?

There are different kinds of nonverbal tasks. Sometimes the instructions are given verbally but the response is pointing, manipulating, constructing, or gesturing. Sometimes both instructions and responses are nonverbal. Some IQ tests are fully nonverbal, others have nonverbal subtests. In a paper published a couple of years ago, we were interested in how bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) performed on nonverbal tests.

Children’s use of Spanish in the U.S. Context

In this paper, we studied Spanish-English bilinguals between the ages of 4 and 7 years old. We were interested in the relationship between bilingual children’s age, their productivity in Spanish (as indexed by MLU) and their accuracy in morpheme production. We found that age didn’t predict correct production of grammatical forms but MLU did. The grammatical forms that children demonstrated mastery on (80% or more accurate) was related to MLU. We also found that relative difficulty for grammatical forms was similar for different levels of Spanish fluency. Let’s break it down.

Here you can see what forms children produced accurately (80% or more correct) as related to their MLU.

This graphic shows the relative difficulty in children’s productives of these forms. These are based on averages from 228 Spanish-English bilingual children between the ages of 4 and 7. Easy forms are those that children on average produced correctly about 70% or more of the time. Medium forms are those children produced correctly about 60% of the time. Finally, the hard items are those that children produced correctly about 40-50% of the time.

I hope that this information is useful for those who work with Spanish-English speaking children.

Dynamic Assessment of Narratives: Which Language Should I Choose?

Dynamic assessment (DA) is a powerful approach that we can employ as part of diagnostic decision making. There are a number of advantages to DA, especially for children whose experiences don’t meet mainstream expectations including dual language learners. A number of DA approaches have been validated and show good sensitivity and specificity. DA of narratives and word learning are two of examples of these approaches.

Grammatical Assessment of Bilingual Children in English

We’ve had a paper out for a couple of years now and I’ve been meaning to blog about it, but for some reason other things have taken priority. The question that we addressed in this study is the extent to which English assessment of children who are Spanish-English bilinguals would be useful for identification of DLD.

Why Opinion and Personal Observation isn’t as good as Systematic Research

Families of bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are often told to use only one language. School district personnel may insist that these children receive instruction in only one language even if there are bilingual programs available. Even bilingual personnel who work with children (teachers and SLPs for example) may say that children with DLD can become more confused if in a bilingual environment. This is simply not true. I have participated in many studies that demonstrate that bilingual children are not more likely to show higher risk for DLD than monolinguals; we know that bilingual children with DLD show comparable performance to monolingual children with DLD; we know that bilingual children with DLD show cognate advantages similar to typical bilinguals; we know that intervention in one language can carry over to the other language. This work is all supported by the data-based research (linked) and is consistent with work that other researchers are doing.

Testing in Two Languages

When we test bilingual children we need to be able to do so in both of their languages. We can to look at speech and language in each of their two languages and we use this information to determine if their language production is like that of their typical (bilingual peers).

In the area of lexical-semantics we know that children who have exposure to two languages often show patterns of lexical knowledge consistent with their divided exposure. They may know home words in the home language and school words in the second language. It makes it difficult to test in only one language, but how do we take account of both their languages?

One of the observations we’ve made in many years of testing bilingual kids is that it is difficult at times for them to switch between languages– especially when they’ve been using English in diagnostics. This doesn’t mean of course that kids don’t codeswitch, they do and they do so during testing, but switching between languages on demand is hard.

Cognate Advantage in DLD

Cognates are really interesting words that share meaning and sound the same across languages. Languages that share the same roots also have a large number of cognates because of their shared histories. Spanish and English share a large number of cognates.

We’ve studied cognate recognition in young children. In that study of kindergarten  and first grade children, we found that Spanish dominant children and English dominant children scored similarly on  a receptive vocabulary test given in English. But, they showed different patterns of response. Those who were Spanish dominant were more likely to know the cognates– even those that were above their age level. English dominant kids tended to know non-cognates. So, consistent with other studies, we found a cognate advantage for Spanish-speaking children learning English as a second language. In a recent study,  we were interested in whether bilingual children with DLD would show a similar cognate advantage.

Does conceptual scoring increase classification accuracy for vocabulary tests?

We’ve (as a field) have known for about 20 years that single word vocabulary tests whether they are receptive or expressive tests are poor indicators of developmental language disorders (DLD). At the same time, these tests are very often used by SLPs as part of a diagnostic. They are easy to give, quick, and highly reliable. It’s hard to make an error in  administration or scoring on these tests. But, reliability is not enough (neither are the other reasons). Even if it only takes 5 minutes and the score is a perfect representation of what the child can do it doesn’t mean that a low score indicates impairment or that a high score indicates typical development. As far as domains of language go– children with DLD do pretty well with vocabulary at the single word level. It’s semantics (connections among words) that they have difficulty with.

Stop Telling Parents of Bilingual Children to Use One Language

I keep hearing these stories and it’s infuriating! There’s no evidence that bilingualism is confusing and no evidence that bilingualism makes developmental language disorder worse so stop it!