Identifying the risk of dyslexia in bilingual children: The potential of language-dependent and language-independent tasks

The study aims to investigate the performance of monolingual and bilingual children with and without reading difficulties on language-dependent and language-independent tasks, and examine the relationship between the performance on these tasks and reading. There were 72 Italian-speaking children: 18 monolingual good readers (MONO-GR, Mage = 10;4), 19 monolingual poor readers (MONO-PR, Mage = 10;3), 21 bilingual good readers (BI-GR, Mage = 10;6), and 16 bilingual poor readers (BI-PR, Mage = 10;6). All bilingual children spoke Italian as their L2. Children completed a battery of standardized Italian reading tests, language-dependent tasks: nonword repetition (NWR), sentence repetition (SR), and phonological awareness (PA), and language-independent experimental tasks: timing anticipation, beat synchronization, rhythmic inhibition control, auditory reaction time, and rapid automatized naming (RAN). Results revealed medium to large significant differences between good and poor readers in their performance on the language-dependent tasks, including NWR, PA and SR. Beat synchronization was the only language-independent task that was sensitive to reading ability, with poor readers showing greater variability in tapping to fast rhythm relative to good readers. SR was the only task that was sensitive to bilingualism status as bilinguals underperformed monolinguals on the task. Moreover, there were weak to moderate correlations between performance on some of the language-dependent tasks (NWR, PA), language-independent tasks (beat synchronization, inhibition control, RAN), and reading measures. Performance on the experimental tasks (except for RAN) was not associated with the length of exposure to Italian. The results highlight the potential of NWR, PA, SR and beat synchronization tasks in identifying the risk of dyslexia in bilingual populations. Future research is needed to validated these findings and to establish the tasks’ diagnostic accuracy.