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Part of
Language Impairment in Multilingual Settings: LITMUS in action across Europe
Edited by Sharon Armon-Lotem and Kleanthes K. Grohmann
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 29] 2021
► pp. 131–166

Language performance of sequential bilinguals on an Irish and English sentence repetition task

| National University of Ireland
| Health Service Executive Longford-Westmeath
| Health Service Executive West

Currently there are no standardized language assessments for English-Irish bilingual school age children that would test languages in a comparable way. There are also no standardized language assessments of Irish for this age group. The current study aimed to design comparable language assessments in both languages targeting structures known to be challenging for children with language impairments. A sentence repetition (SRep) task equivalent to the English SRep task (Marinis, Chiat, Armon-Lotem, Piper, & Roy, 2011) was designed for Irish. Twenty-four typically developing, sequential bilingual children immersed in Irish in the educational setting performed better on the English SRep task than on the Irish SRep task. Different patterns were observed in language performance across sentence types with performance on relative clauses being particularly poor in Irish. Similarly, differences were observed in error patterns with the highest number of errors of omission in Irish, and the highest number of substitution errors in English.

Keywords: Irish, bilingualism, sentence repetition, sequential bilingualism, minority language
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Language proficiency in bilinguals
  • 3.Bilingualism and Language impairments
  • 4.Sentence repetition task
  • 5.Method
    • 5.1Construction of Irish SRep task
    • 5.2Participants
    • 5.3Procedure
    • 5.4Scoring
    • 5.5Data analysis
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Reliability and validity of the SRep tasks
    • 6.2Effect of age and length of exposure on language skills
    • 6.3Analysis across languages
    • 6.4Analysis across sentence types within each language
    • 6.5Error analyses
      • 6.5.1Analyses across languages
      • 6.5.2Analysis across word and error type withing each language
      • 6.5.3Qualitative analysis of errors across sentence types
        • 6.5.3.1Irish
        • 6.5.3.2English
  • 7.Discussion
    • 7.1Reliability and validity of Irish SRep task
    • 7.2Factors that influence L2 performance
    • 7.3Language skills in L1 and L2
      • 7.3.1Pattern of frequency of correct repetitions across sentence types
      • 7.3.2Error patterns
    • 7.4Clinical application
    • 7.5Future studies
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 18 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.29.05ant
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