The Bilingual Delay is a MYTH

Last year I had a chance to present this project at Asha, and the paper was published this year in JSLHR. It’s open access so any one can read it! (though when things are behind a paywall and I am an author I am happy to send you a copy, so just ask).

This is a follow up paper to one that is still in development, but we hope to get that one out too. I’ve written about the bilingual delay before, here and here. And my biggest concern about this myth is that often schools, special educators, and yes, SLPs, use this to deny needed services to bilingual children. I so often hear or see comments along the lines of:

• Yes, they do show low skills in both languages, but that’s normal, because of the “bilingual delay.”
• We expect bilingual kids to show delays in both languages, let’s give them more time
• That pattern of low scores in L1 and L2 is what I often see and it’s normal.

THESE ARE ALL MYTHS!!!

It can APPEAR that bilinguals are delayed if they are tested in only one language. In group studies children who are in the most balanced exposure group (around 50/50 exposure) have lower scores than their more monolingual counterparts. But, these are based on AVERAGES. What happens if we look at scores at the individual level? That’s what we did. Here are scores for 600 bilingual Spanish-English speaking US children. The solid lines represent 500 typical kids, and the dotted lines represent 100 kids with DLD. These are all standard scores with a mean of 100 and a SD of 15. You can see that the Spanish scores (in purple) go down as they have more exposure to English; and the English scores (in blue) go up. So, yes, it does look like the kids in the middle (who have more balanced exposure) are low in both.

But, let’s look at individual scores. Here, we show the English and Spanish scores for kids who have more than 90% exposure to English (blue bar). You can see that all but one score better in English. We see the same general pattern for Spanish (pink bar) most of the kids with a lot of Spanish exposure do better in Spanish. What about the kids in the middle– the yellow bar. Well, it’s 50/50! Some kids do better in Spanish and some do better in English!

So, we then went back to the data and graphed the kids again. This time in their best language only. So, if their score was higher in English, we put in that score into the graph, and if it was higher in Spanish we entered that score. Here are the results. The lines are essentially straight. And there are no significant differences associated with exposure to language. For typical kids, the average scores are right at 100 across the board. And for kids with DLD, their scores average around 60, again across the board. So, I would expect a typical child to show scores in the normal range in at least one of their languages. Kids with DLD will show low scores in both. And notice, that their better scores are within the same range as more monolingual kids, so again they can handle bilingualism.

So, please stop perpetuating myths. There is no such thing as a bilingual delay. We included kids with early exposure and late exposure to two languages, and kids with the whole range of current exposure. There is no bilingual delay.

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.

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!

Do bilinguals have to be tested in both languages?

Yes, no, maybe, it depends. 

Bilingual Research Needs

I’m at the airport in Washington DC after participating in a workshop at tha NIH on dual language learners. We talked about the state of the art. What’s cool is that there has been so much progress. We know that bilingualism isn’t bad for you and that in fact it could be good for you. We have better ideas about how to diagnose bilinguals with language impairment. At least in some languages. We know about what works for Spanish and English. We have emerging data for Mandarin-English and Vietnamese-English as well as other language pairs. We have an emerging picture about bilingual development in two languages. 

But, there’s still a lot we don’t know. We don’t fully understand how changes in the linguistic environment affect child performance on language measures. We still don’t have a God handle in intervention for bilinguals with langquge impairment.  Do we treat in one language or both? Do we use translanguaging approaches?  

I don’t think we fully understand how bilingualism affects the brain. Nor do we know how the environment shapes the brains of children with language impairment.

We heard about reading disorder and mechanisms associated with dyslexia. Children can and do learn to read in two languages but we don’t really understand how those languages interact and how languages that have different writing systems interact in the bilingual brain. 

Even though we’ve made progress in identification of impairment we don’t do such a great job across languages and at all ages. 

So we know a lot we have a ways to go 

Does language and experience matter in NWR?

It is well known that different languages have different phonological structures. Some have lots of sounds put together in certain ways, other languages have fewer sounds and these go together perhaps in other ways. Comparing Spanish and English is interesting in the US context because Spanish is the second most common language after English. The majority of English language learners in the US speak Spanish as a first language. 

Normal “Delayed” Bilingual Vocabulary Acquisition

Bilingual children, whether they’re sequential or simultaneous bilinguals have divided input. In their every day experiences they might do some activities in one language and other activities in the other language. Because of this, they often know some words in their L1 and other words in their L2; some words (but not ALL) they know in both. There are a number of studies that shows this for children at different ages.

The Military Gets It

Officials seek bilingual officers for training school. This is the headline of an article I read this morning in my google news. They’re looking for Captains in the Air Force who have Spanish language skills to participate in the Inter-American Squadron Officer School. The program focuses on development of Latin American specialists within the military.

Bilingual Education Can Benefit All Students

This is the title of Alexandra Sabater’s post in the Dallas news opinion blog.  She writes eloquently about the benefits of bilingual education from her perspective as a teacher. It got me thinking about beliefs about bilingual education for children who have language impairment.

Kids Recognize Cognates

We have a new article published in Early Childhood Services  called, Cognates Facilitate Word Recognition in Young Spanish-English Bilinguals’ Test Performance (Perez, Peña, & Bedore, 2010). This is part of a study funded by the NIH called Diagnostic Markers of Language Impairment. In this study, we’re trying to identify the combination of markers that best identify bilingual children who have language impairment. One of the tests that we use in the study is the TOLD-P:3. Early in the study Anita Perez noticed that children who were Spanish dominant seemed to do well on cognate items on the receptive vocabulary subtest of the TOLD which is given only in English. We decided to explore this question further by giving the next group of kids participating on the project all the items from that subtest. That way we could have item data of the same set of items for a group of kiddos.