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Purpose: Phonological complexity is known to be a good index of developmental language disorder (DLD) in normal-hearing children, who have major difficulties on some complex structures. Some deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) present a profile that evokes DLD, with persistent linguistic difficulties despite good audiological and environmental conditions. However, teasing apart what is related to auditory deficit or to language disorder remains complex. Method: We compared the performance of three groups of school-age children, 33 children with CI, 22 with DLD, and 24 with typical development, on a nonword repetition (NWR) task based on phonological complexity. Children with CI were studied regarding their linguistic profile, categorized in four subgroups ranging from excellent to very poor performance. Influence of syllable length and phonological structures on the results of all the children were explored. Results: The NWR task correctly distinguished children with DLD from typically developing children, and also children with CI with the poorest linguistic performance from other children with CI. However, most complex phonological structures did not reliably identify children with CI displaying a profile similar to that of children with DLD because these structures were difficult for all of the children with CI. The simplest phonological structures were better at detecting persistent language difficulties in children with CI, as they were challenging only for the children with the poorest language outcomes. Conclusions: The most complex phonological structures are not good indices of language disorder in children with CI. Phonological complexity represents a gradient of difficulty that affects normal-hearing and deaf children differently.

Background and aims: Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been found to exhibit difficulties in "wh"-question production. It is unclear whether these difficulties are pragmatic or syntactic in nature. The current study used a question elicitation task to assess the production of subject and object "wh"-questions of children with ASD in two different languages (Hebrew and French) wherein the syntactic structure of "wh"-questions is different, a fact that may contribute to better understanding of the underlying deficits affecting "wh"-question production. Crucially, beyond the general correct/error rate we also performed an in-depth analysis of error types, comparing syntactic to pragmatic errors and comparing the distribution of errors in the ASD group to that of children with typical development (TD) and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Results: Correct production rates were found to be similar for the ASD and DLD groups, but error analysis revealed important differences between the ASD groups in the two languages and the DLD group. The Hebrew- and French ASD groups were found to produce pragmatic errors, which were not found in children with DLD. The pragmatic errors were similar in the two ASD groups. Syntactic errors were affected by the structure of each language. Conclusions: Our results have shown that although the two ASD groups come from different countries and speak different languages, the correct production rates and more importantly, the error types were very similar in the two ASD groups, and very different compared to TD children and children with DLD. Implications: Our results highlight the importance of creating research tasks that test different linguistic functions independently and strengthen the need for conducting fine-grained error analysis to differentiate between groups and gain insights into the deficits underlying each of them.

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been shown to be excellent indicators of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, there is still no consensus about which core ability they measure: language vs. Verbal Short-Term Memory (VSTM) and Verbal Working Memory (WM). Moreover, very few studies have investigated whether variables predicting SR performance differ in children with DLD compared to typically developing (TD) children, especially concerning bilingual children. This article reports on an SR study of 76 5- to 8-year-old bilingual children with (n = 23) and without (n = 53) DLD. The Bi-DLD group displayed significantly lower scores than the Bi-TD group on SR and on VSTM and WM measures. Regression analyses showed that SR was mainly linked to WM in the Bi-DLD group, but not in the TD group, where SR was mainly linked to (independent) language measures. This suggests that children with DLD, who have deficient linguistic knowledge, may rely more on their general processing ability (i.e. WM) in contrast to Bi-TD children, whose language skills are normal, and thus can be solicited for SR. Moreover, individual results suggested that performance on SR does not depend on minimal VSTM or WM spans.

Background: The detection of specific language impairment (SLI) in children growing up bilingually presents particular challenges for clinicians. Non-word repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR) tasks have proven to be the most accurate diagnostic tools for monolingual populations, raising the question of the extent of their usefulness in different bilingual populations. Aims: To determine the diagnostic accuracy of NWR and SR tasks that incorporate phonological/syntactic complexity as discussed in recent linguistic theory. The tasks were developed as part of the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) toolkit, in two different national settings, France and Germany, and investigated children with three different home languages: Arabic, Portuguese and Turkish. Methods & Procedures: NWR and SR tasks developed in parallel were administered to 151 bilingual children, aged 5;6-8;11, in France and in Germany, to 64 children in speech-language therapy (SLT) and to 87 children not in SLT, whose first language (L1) was Arabic, Portuguese or Turkish. Children were also administered standardized language tests in each of their languages to determine likely clinical status (typical development (TD) or SLI), and parents responded to a questionnaire including questions about early and current language use (bilingualism factors) and early language development (risk factors for SLI). Monolingual controls included 47 TD children and 29 children with SLI. Results were subjected to inter-group comparisons, to diagnostic accuracy calculation, and to correlation and multiple regression analyses. Outcomes & Results: In accordance with previous studies, NWR and SR identified SLI in the monolingual children, yielding good to excellent diagnostic accuracy. Diagnostic accuracy in bilingual children was fair to good, generally distinguishing children likely to have SLI from children likely to have TD. Accuracy was necessarily linked to the determination of clinical status, which was based on standardized assessment in each of the child's languages. Positive early development, a composite risk factor for SLI, and not variables related to language exposure and use, generally emerged as the strongest predictor of performance on the two tasks, constituting additional, independent support for the efficacy of NWR and SR in identifying impairment in bilingual children. Conclusions & Implications: NWR and SR tasks informed by linguistic theory are appropriate for use as part of the diagnostic process for identifying language impairment in bilingual children for whom the language of assessment is different from the home language, in diverse sociolinguistic contexts.

Identifying specific language impairment (SLI) in bilingual children represents a clinical challenge because of similarities in language behavior between child second language learners and monolinguals with SLI and because of the lack of standardized language tests on bilingual children. This study investigated the relevance of a LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) sentence repetition (SR) task based on language properties difficult for French-speaking children with SLI for the diagnosis of language impairment in bilinguals. The task was administered to 47 bilingual children aged 5;02 to 8;09, 35 with typical development (TD) and 12 with SLI, and to 50 monolingual controls (37 with TD and 13 with SLI). Percentage of identical repetition significantly distinguished between children with SLI and children with TD in both bilinguals and monolinguals and on all structure types. Moreover, no correlations were found between factors of bilingual development, such as age of onset, length of exposure, and quantity and quality of input, and the low repetition rates of the bilingual children with SLI, suggesting that the LITMUS-SR-French task can be used as an efficient diagnosis tool in bilinguals.

In Lebanese Arabic, lexical subjects may occur before or after verbs, but only before non-verbal predicates. Analysis of spontaneous language samples from 19 two-year-old children shows that postverbal (VS) and preverbal (SV) subjects emerge simultaneously. The youngest children displayed no VS-SV difference in frequency. A slight preference for SV is observed in older children. No preference for SV subjects was found in the speech of the mothers of the younger or older children. Lexical subjects systematically appeared before non-verbal predicates. We interpret these results as evidence for early knowledge of syntactic movement, consistent with Wexler's (1998) Very Early Parameter Setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores complex language in adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) with the aim of finding out how aspects of language characteristic of typical syntactic development after childhood fare and, in particular, whether there is evidence that individuals with SLI avoid using structures whose syntactic derivation involves greater computational complexity. An analysis of spontaneous language samples of 18 French-speaking adolescents with SLI, compared to groups of typically developing speakers, showed that whereas complexity increases with age in the latter, behaviors of avoidance are clear in the former, in the form of low frequencies of complex structures, but also frequency of failed attempts and alternative strategies. Whereas increasing complexity is the hallmark of syntactic development after childhood, avoidance of complexity appears to characterize SLI after childhood.

Purpose: The authors' purpose was to explore the nature of the link between hearing loss (HL) and language impairment in adolescents with mild-to-moderate hearing loss (MMHL). Does language performance (generally or in certain areas) normalize at adolescence? Method: The language skills of 19 French-speaking adolescents (ages 11-15) with moderate or mild sensorineural HL were evaluated via a series of tests assessing oral and written language, including an experimental probe, and compared with typically developing adolescents and adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI). Results: Language disorders were found, notably in the areas of phonology and grammar, in more than half the adolescents with MMHL; affected domains and error patterns were identical to those found in adolescents with SLI. Language scores of the adolescents with MMHL were significantly linked with degree of HL, a correlation not generally found in studies of children with MMHL. Conclusion: Normalization of language performance does not generalize at adolescence in the context of MMHL. The fact that an effect of the severity of HL was found only after childhood might be because linguistic development is basically complete at adolescence. Prior to this time, this effect could be obscured by developmental rhythms that vary from child to child. (Contains 2 tables and 3 figures.)

Bilingual language development in children with autism is a new field; the entire body of literature, which is so far sparse, has been published within the last ten years. The potential impact of this research is, however, very high, due to increasing numbers of children growing up bilingually in many countries crossed with the rising number of children being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Parents and practitioners need guidelines with solid empirical foundations which could provide the base for answering questions about language practices. Overall, no detrimental effects of bilingualism have so far been reported for either language development or characteristics related to autism. Based on a scoping review, this paper assesses these findings and addresses what current knowledge allows us to conclude about bilingual language development in autism. It is suggested that while recent studies are posing more sophisticated research questions and using more appropriate tools, remaining issues, notably related to how variables related to autism and to bilingualism are taken into account, render clarity on this research topic elusive at this point. It is argued that future studies should directly take up the challenge of addressing diversity in both ASD and in bilingualism, and their intersection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3.2 Effects of social interaction deficits on the role bilingual experience variables play Deficits in social interaction, possibly enhanced statistical learning/systemizing, and/or their interaction might mean that different variables inherent to bilingual experience could play a very different role in Bi-ASD language development compared to other contexts. In this response, we first comment on some issues raised by the authors regarding methodology, and then focus on two particular points we find important: heterogeneity (in bilingualism and ASD) and language acquisition with limited social interaction (and the implications for Bi-ASD language development). Methodological issues regarding (bilingual) language development in autism Several commentaries concurred with us that investigating Bi-ASD language development should include underrepresented individuals (e.g., minimally-verbal [MV] children), as well as relevant comparative groups, and involve all linguistic domains, different properties within each domain, and varying degrees of complexity for targeted structures. In the keynote article ([20]), we took a critical look at the conclusion, which seems to emerge from the literature, that bilingualism does not have negative effects on language development in autistic children. [Extracted from the article]

This study examines French object clitic production in 20 typically developing L2 children (L1 English) compared to 19 monolingual children with SLI. We collected spontaneous and elicitation data twice at a one-year interval (T1, T2) in order to better evaluate the impact of age- and time-related factors on the L2-SLI comparison, as well as the impact of proficiency and working memory on object clitic production. The data revealed considerable group overlap at T1 in both tasks, but the L2 children produced significantly more object clitics than the SLI group at T2 in spontaneous language, thus suggesting that the L2-SLI overlap decreases when the L2 children have more language exposure. In elicitation, clitic production in both groups increased from T1 to T2 when all clitic types were included, but when only 3p accusative clitics were analyzed, the L2 children outperformed the SLI group. Age played an important role in elicitation in both groups, thus suggesting that mature performance systems, including unimpaired working memory, are required for object clitic production in this task. Language-related measures were linked to both tasks, thus suggesting that object clitic production is particularly sensitive to overall language proficiency, possibly because of issues with resource allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing language in sequential bilinguals (L2 children) for the identification of language impairment suffers from lack of appropriate standardized tools and from limited understanding of the developmental trajectories of these learners. This longitudinal study compares L2 children to children with SLI in order to better understand where these groups have overlapping performance and where they differ. An analysis of standardized test scores as well as frequency of clausal embedding and morphosyntactic errors in spontaneous speech was conducted with 22 English-speaking children (aged 6;9-12;7) acquiring French as an L2 in France and 19 monolingual French-speaking children with SLI (aged 6;5–12;11). The results revealed that L2 children used clausal embedding more often than the children with SLI, but both groups had similar rates of morphosyntactic accuracy. Facility with clausal embedding from early stages of development and continuing difficulty with morphosyntactic accuracy are argued to be characteristic of typical development in L2 children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]