Assessment of Bilingual Children for Identification of Language Impairment: Current Findings and Implications for Practice

TLDR

Bilingual children are often misidentified for language impairment, either overidentified due to inadequate developmental expectations or underidentified because educators wait for second‑language acquisition. The review aims to synthesize language acquisition data and propose a decision‑making framework to identify bilingual children at risk for language impairment. The authors critique current assessment methods and present a framework emphasizing clinical markers for identifying language impairment in bilingual children.

Abstract

Abstract Children from bilingual backgrounds are sometimes overidentified with language impairment (LI) because educators do not have appropriate developmental expectations. At other times bilingual children are underidentified because educators wait to identify difficulties while children learn the second language. In this review we discuss data on language acquisition from several sources including cross-linguistic studies of typical first language acquisition and LI in monolingual and bilingual children. Based on this literature we discuss problems with current assessment approaches. We then propose a decision-making framework for identification of bilingual children who are at risk for LI. A key feature of this proposal is the importance of clinical markers for identification of LI.