Article published in:

Language Impairment in Bilingual Children: State of the art 2017
Edited by Theodoros Marinis, Sharon Armon-Lotem and George Pontikas
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 7:3/4] 2017
► pp. 331–358

Identification of bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment in France

Laetitia de Almeida | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Sandrine Ferré | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Eléonore Morin | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Philippe Prévost | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Christophe dos Santos | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Laurie Tuller | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Racha Zebib | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Marie-Anne Barthez | Centre de Référence des Troubles du Langage et des Apprentissages de Tours

We report on the usefulness of three LITMUS tools in distinguishing bilingual children with SLI (Bi-SLI) from bilingual children with typical development (Bi-TD), in France: LITMUS-NWR-FR (non-word repetition), LITMUS-SR-FR (sentence repetition), and LITMUS-PABIQ (parental questionnaire). 82 bilingual children, aged 5–8, who had all been exposed to both French and either Arabic, Portuguese or Turkish, recruited both in ordinary schools and in SLP practices, were divided into Bi-TD (n = 61) and Bi-SLI (n = 21) groups based on parental questionnaire (LITMUS-PABIQ) information and standardized language scores in each language. Monolingual controls included 17 children with SLI and 37 TD children. NWR and SR significantly distinguished between the Bi-TD and the Bi-SLI children, and there was minimal impact of different factors related to bilingual development on children’s performance.

Keywords: Bilingualism, Acquisition, Specific Language Impairment

Published online: 06 February 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15019.alm

References

Armon-Lotem, S.

(2012) Introduction: Bilingual children with SLI – the nature of the problem. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 1–4.

Armon-Lotem, S, de Jong, J., & Meir, N.

(Eds.) (2015) Assessing multilingual children: Disentangling bilingualism from language impairment. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Armon-Lotem, S., Walters, J., & Gargarina, N.

(2011) The impact of internal and external factors on linguistic performance in the home language and in L2 among Russian- Hebrew and Russian-German preschool children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 291–317.

Brandeker, M. & Thordadottir, E.

(2015) Language exposure in bilingual toddlers: Performance on nonword repetition and lexical tasks. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 24, 126–138.

Castro, S. L., Caló, S., Gomes, I., Kay, J., Lesser, R., & Coltheart, M.

(2007) PALPA-P Provas de Avaliação da Linguagem e da Afasia em Português. Lisboa: CEGOC.

Chevrie-Muller, C. & Plaza, M.

(2001) N-EEL Nouvelles épreuves pour l’examen du langage. Paris: ECPA.

Chiat, S.

(2015) Nonword repetition. In S. Armon-Lotem, J. de Jong, & N. Meir (Eds.), Assessing multilingual children: Disentangling bilingualism from language impairment (pp. 123–148). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Chiat, S., Armon-Lotem, S., Marinis, T., Polišenská, K., Roy, P. & Seeff-Gabriel, B.

(2013) The potential of sentence imitation tasks for assessment of language abilities in sequential bilingual children. In V. Mueller-Gathercole (Ed.), Issues in the assessment of bilinguals (pp. 56–89). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Chondrogianni, V. & Marinis, T.

(2011) Differential effects of internal and external factors on the development of vocabulary, tense morphology and morphosyntax in successive bilingual children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 318–345.

Condon, S. & Régnard, C.

(2010) Héritage et pratiques linguistiques des descendants d’immigrés en France. Hommes et migrations, 1288, 44–56.

Conti-Ramsden, G., Botting, N., & Faragher, B.

(2001) Psycholinguistic markers for specific language impairment (SLI). Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 741–748.

Ferré, S. & dos Santos, C.

(2015) Un test de répétition de non-mots pour évaluer la phonologie des enfants bilingues. LiDiL, 51, 11–34.

Ferré, S., dos Santos, C. & de Almeida, L.

(2015) Potential Phonological Markers for SLI in bilingual children. In E. Grillo & K. Jepson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 152–164). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Ferré, S., Tuller, L., Sizaret, E., & Barthez, M.-A.

(2012) Acquiring and avoiding phonological complexity in SLI vs. typical development of French: The case of consonant clusters. In P. Hoole, L. Bombien, M. Pouplier, C. Mooshammer, & B. Kühnert (Eds.), Consonant clusters and structural complexity (pp. 285–308). Berlin: De Gruyter.

Fleckstein, A., Prévost, P., Tuller, L., Sizaret, E., & Zebib, R.

(2016) How to identify SLI in bilingual children? A study on sentence repetition in French. Language Acquisition.

Genesee, F., Paradis, J., & Crago, M.

(2004) Dual language development and disorders: A handbook on bilingualism and second language learning. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes.

Gibson, T., Summers, C., Peña, E., Bedore, L., Gillam, R., & Bohman, T.

(2015) The role of phonological structure and experience in bilingual children’s nonword repetition performance. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18, 551–560.

Girbau, D. & Schwartz, R. G.

(2008) Phonological working memory in Spanish-English bilingual children with and without specific language impairment. Journal of Communication Disorders, 41, 124–145

Guttiérez-Clellen, V. F. & Simon-Cereijido, G.

(2010) Using nonword repetition tasks for the identification of language impairment in Spanish-English speaking children: Does the language of assessment matter? Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 25(1), 48–58.

Hamann, C.

(2012) Bilingual development and language assessment. In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung, & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 1–28). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Journal officiel

(2013) Décret n° 2013–682 du 24-7-2013 du Ministère de l’éducation nationale, J.O. du 28-7-2013. Retrieved from http://www.education.gouv.fr/ pid25535/bulletin_ officiel.html?cid_bo=73449.

Khomsi, A., Khomsi, J., Pasquet, F., & Parbeau-Gueno, A.

(2007) Bilan Informatisé de langage Oral au cycle III et au Collège (BILO3C). Paris: ECPA.

Maddieson, I., Flavier, S., Marsico, E. & Pellegrino, F.

(2011) LAPSyD: Lyon-Albuquerque Phonological Systems Databases, Version 1.0. http://www.lapsyd.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/.

Marinis, T. & Armon-Lotem, S.

(2015) Sentence repetition. In S. Armon-Lotem, J. de Jong, & N. Meir (Eds.), Assessing multilingual children. Disentangling bilingualism from language impairment (pp. 95–122). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Paradis, J.

(2004) The relevance of SLI in understanding the role of transfer in second language acquisition. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25, 67–82.

(2011) Individual differences in child English second-language acquisition: comparing child-internal and child-external factors. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 213–237.

Paradis, J. & Crago, M.

(2000) Tense and temporality: a comparison between children learning a second language and children with SLI. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing research, 43, 834–847.

Plante, E. & Vance, R.

(1994) Diagnostic accuracy of two tests of preschool language. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 4, 70–76.

Prévost, P., Tuller, L., Scheidnes, M., Ferré, S. & Haiden, M.

(2010) Computational complexity effects in the acquisition of wh-questions in child L2 French. In L. Dominguez & P. Guijarres-Fuentes (Eds.), New directions in language acquisition: Romance languages in the generative perspective (pp. 415–444). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Prévost, Philippe, Tuller, Laurice and Rasha Zebib

2012 LITMUS-SR-French. ms, Université François-Rabelais de Tours.

Raven, J. C., Court, J. & Raven, J.

(1986) Raven’s coloured matrices. London: H. K. Lewis.

dos Santos, C. & Ferré, S.

(2016) A nonword repetition task to assess bilingual children phonology. Language Acquisition.

Scheidnes, M. & Tuller L.

(2013) L2 children embed normally, but children with SLI do not. In M. Lobo & A. L. Santos (Eds.), Selected Proceedings of the Romance Turn V (pp. 261–284). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Sharp, K. & Gathercole, V.

(2013) Can a novel word repetition task be a language-neutral assessment tool? Evidence from Welsh-English bilingual children. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 29, 77–89.

Sua-Kay E. & Santos, M. E.

(2014) Grelha de Avaliação da Linguagem – nível escolar (GOL-E). Alcoitão: Escola Superior de Saúde do Alcoitão. 2ª edição revista.

Thordardottir, E.

(2015) Proposed Diagnostic procedures for use in bilingual and cross-linguistic contexts. In S. Armon-Lotem, J. de Jong, & N. Meir (Eds.), Assessing multilingual children: Disentangling bilingualism from language impairment (pp. 331–358). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Thordardottir, E. & Brandeker, M.

(2013) The effect of bilingual exposure versus language impairment on nonword repetition and sentence imitation scores. Journal of Communication Disorders, 46, 1–16.

Thordardottir, E. & Juliusdottir, A. G.

(2013) Icelandic as a second language: A longitudinal study of language knowledge and processing by school-age children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16, 411–435.

Topbaş, S. & Güven, S.

(2008) Turkce Erken Dil Gelisim Testi (Test of Early Language Development-TELD3. Turkish adaptation).

Topbaş, S., Kaçar-Kütükçü, D., & Kopkallı-Yavuz, H.

(2014) Performance of children on the Turkish nonword repetition test: Effect of word similarity, word length, and scoring. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 28, 602–616.

Tuller, L.

(2015) Clinical use of parental questionnaires in multilingual contexts. In S. Armon-Lotem, J. de Jong, & N. Meir (Eds.), Assessing multilingual children: Disentangling bilingualism from language impairment (pp. 299–328). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Tuller, L., Abboud, L., Ferré, S., Fleckstein, A., Prévost, P., dos Santos, C., Scheidnes, M. & Zebib, R.

(2015) Specific language impairment and bilingualism: Assembling the pieces. In C. Hamann & E. Ruigendijk (Eds.), Language acquisition and development: Proceedings of GALA 2013. (pp. 533–567). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Unsworth, S., Argyri, F., Lornips, L., Hulk, A., Sorace, A., & Tsimpli, I.

(2014) The role of age of onset and input in early child bilingualism in Greek and Dutch. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35, 765–805.

Xu Rattanasone, N. & Demuth, K.

(2014) The acquisition of coda consonants by Mandarin early child L2 learners of English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17, 646–659.

Zebib, R., Hamann, C., Prévost, P., Aid Ibrahim, L. & Tuller, L.

(2016) Syntactic complexity, verbal working memory, and executive function in bilingual children with and without SLI: a sentence repetition study in France and in Germany. Paper presented at the 38th annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), University of Konstanz, Germany.

Cited by

Cited by other publications

Abed Ibrahim, Lina & István Fekete

2019. What Machine Learning Can Tell Us About the Role of Language Dominance in the Diagnostic Accuracy of German LITMUS Non-word and Sentence Repetition Tasks. Frontiers in Psychology 9

Altinkamis, Feyza & Ellen Simon

2020. Language abilities in bilingual children: The effect of family background and language exposure on the development of Turkish and Dutch. International Journal of Bilingualism ► pp. 136700692090988 ff.

de Almeida, Laetitia, Sandrine Ferré, Marie-Anne Barthez & Christophe dos Santos

2019. What do monolingual and bilingual children with and without SLI produce when phonology is too complex?. First Language 39:2 ► pp. 158 ff.

Ebert, Kerry Danahy & Giang Pham

2019. Including Nonlinguistic Processing Tasks in the Identification of Developmental Language Disorder. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 28:3 ► pp. 932 ff.

Hamann, Cornelia & Lina Abed Ibrahim

2017. Methods for Identifying Specific Language Impairment in Bilingual Populations in Germany. Frontiers in Communication 2

Köpke, Barbara & Dobrinka Genevska-Hanke

2018. First Language Attrition and Dominance: Same Same or Different?. Frontiers in Psychology 9

Scheidnes, Maureen

2020. Sentence repetition and non-word repetition in early total French immersion. Applied Psycholinguistics 41:1 ► pp. 107 ff.

Silleresi, Silvia, Philippe Prévost, Racha Zebib, Fédérique Bonnet‐Brilhault, Donatello Conte & Laurice Tuller

2020. Identifying Language and Cognitive Profiles in Children With ASD via a Cluster Analysis Exploration: Implications for the New ICD‐11. Autism Research

Silleresi, Silvia, Laurie Tuller, Hélène Delage, Stephanie Durrleman, Frédérique Bonnet-Brilhault, Joëlle Malvy & Philippe Prévost

2018. In On the Acquisition of the Syntax of Romance [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 62], ► pp. 235 ff.

Tuller, Laurice, Cornelia Hamann, Solveig Chilla, Sandrine Ferré, Eléonore Morin, Philippe Prevost, Christophe dos Santos, Lina Abed Ibrahim & Racha Zebib

2018. Identifying language impairment in bilingual children in France and in Germany. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders 53:4 ► pp. 888 ff.

Valente, Daniela, Sophie Kern, Christophe dos Santos, F. Neveu, B. Harmegnies, L. Hriba & S. Prévost

2018. Does first word development in bilingual French-Portuguese toddlers mirror monolingual one? A study exploring executive function abilities. SHS Web of Conferences 46 ► pp. 10006 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 may 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.