Developmental perspectives on bilingual Swedish-Arabic children with and without language impairment: a longitudinal...

There is a need for studies on bilingual language acquisition in combination with language impairment (LI). The speech and language clinician must have tools to differentiate between problems depending on inadequate exposure to a language and problems depending on a LI. Another important issue is the pace of bilingual language acquisition relative to the severity of LI.

To investigate grammatical development over 12 months in both languages in 10 Swedish-Arabic pre-school children with severe LI and 10 Swedish-Arabic pre-school children without LI.

The children were matched for age, gender, exposure to Swedish dialect, and exposure to Arabic dialect. The developmental hierarchy predicted by Processability Theory was used in tests in both Swedish and Arabic. Processability Theory was used as a yardstick to measure grammatical development in both languages.

Bilingual children, both with and without LI, developed grammatical structures in Swedish and Arabic in the same implicational way. Children with severe LI could develop two languages, although the pace of development was much slower in both languages. Bilingual children with severe LI were also more vulnerable to limited exposure of both their languages.

A developmental perspective is important to understand the nature of LI in bilingual children. The results also have implications for the assessment of language development in bilingual children with severe LI, since a hardly perceptible development over time is observed.