Considering bias in language assessment with bilingual children

Area of Science:

• Child Language Acquisition
• Neurodevelopmental Disorders
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Bilingual language assessment can introduce bias, potentially misidentifying developmental language disorder (DLD).
• Traditional language assessments, like sentence repetition, may not accurately reflect DLD in diverse populations.
• Nonlinguistic cognitive processing tasks offer a potential solution by bypassing linguistic demands.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the assessment bias of nonlinguistic cognitive processing tasks compared to sentence repetition.
• To examine the psychometric properties of nonlinguistic tasks in bilingual and monolingual children.
• To explore performance variations in nonlinguistic tasks based on first language typology and exposure.

Main Methods:

• 161 children aged 5-7 from diverse linguistic backgrounds participated.
• Children completed nonlinguistic auditory and visual assessments of processing speed, attention, and working memory.
• Performance was compared between bilingual and monolingual groups, with bilingual-to-bilingual analyses conducted.

Main Results:

• Nonlinguistic cognitive processing tasks demonstrated minimal assessment bias.
• Sentence repetition tasks exhibited more significant bias compared to nonlinguistic measures.
• Performance on nonlinguistic tasks varied by language typology and exposure, but bias remained low.

Conclusions:

• Nonlinguistic cognitive processing tasks are less biased assessment tools for identifying DLD in diverse populations.
• These tasks can improve the accuracy of DLD identification, especially in bilingual children.
• Further research into nonlinguistic assessments can enhance equitable language disorder diagnosis.