Search

This study provides a preliminary validation of a Greek Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) with a sample of 110 monolingual and bilingual typically developing (TLD) children and examines the test's ability to distinguish between Greek monolingual children and age-matched Albanian-Greek bilinguals using a Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysis. This is the first study to report on the psychometric evaluation of a Greek SRT and its discriminatory ability with typical populations. Since most language assessments are standardized with monolinguals and bilingual children tend to underperform on these compared to monolinguals, it is essential to establish the level of bilingual TLD children's ability on the same tests before moving on to diagnose language impairment in bilinguals. Results showed that the Greek SRT had very high validity and reliability scores, with Accuracy measures being more reliable than Grammaticality measures. The school-age monolingual and bilingual TLD children reached different cut-off scores on this task.

Twenty-eight Albanian-Greek bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and 28 children with Autism Spectrum Disorder but no language impairment, along with 28 typically-developing, age-, Performance IQ- and socioeconomic status-matched bilingual children were asked to produce two expository texts which were coded for spelling (phonological, grammatical, orthographic) errors, stress and punctuation use. The children’s expressive vocabulary, current language use and home language history were also measured. The results show that the bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder were particularly vulnerable to spelling errors, while their bilingual peers with Autism Spectrum Disorder were rather challenged by stress and punctuation. The evidence speaks in favor of distinct patterns of writing impairment across the bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Prior research on the linguistic abilities of Southern English- (SE) and African-American English-speaking children (SAAE) revealed unexpectedly high rates of risk for a language disorder (Christodoulou & Tsimpli 2021; Moland & Oetting 2021). This study examines the performance of 139 SE-, 46 SAAE-, and 35 Mainstream American English-speaking children (MAE), aged 2-13, and analyzes their performance, through twelve sections, in four key linguistic domains: syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology, using a standardized assessment test. Results revealed a parallel performance across the three groups in all linguistic domains. The highest means of accuracy were noted with phonology and the lowest with semantics. Analysis of the participants’ performance by age evidenced a virtually identical performance across the three groups after age 6 or 7, but considerable variations were noted with younger children. Results from the current study contradict results from previous work showing considerably high rates of risk for a language disorder for the SAAE-speaking children, as their performance is parallel to not only that of SE-speaking children but it also the performance of MAE-speaking children. Results from the current study could help guide educational policies, especially for early education programs, as well as diagnostic assessment and rehabilitation.

Children with autism often display discrepancies in their intellectual functioning, with nonverbal skills frequently being more developed than verbal. Compared to monolingual autistic children, however, much less is known about how bilingualism affects intelligence in autism. The current study examined the intelligence profiles of 146 bilingual and 170 age- and gender-matched monolingual children with autism (6–17 years) using the Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children-Third Edition, by tracking cluster profiles across children and by modeling verbal and nonverbal IQ performance in each cluster as a function of language experience (monolinguals vs bilinguals), socioeconomic status, and age. The results reveal that socioeconomic status, operationalized as mother’s years of education, mediated by bilingualism was strongly related to autistic children’s intelligence. Low-socioeconomic status bilingual autistic children exhibited better performance than their monolingual peers across both the verbal and nonverbal intelligence subtests. However, the difference found in the intelligence profiles between monolinguals and bilinguals belonging to high-socioeconomic status was limited to the Comprehension Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children test, with high-socioeconomic status monolingual autistic children outperforming their bilingual peers. The findings highlight the importance of investigating bilingualism effects in relation to socioeconomic status in autism. Lay abstract Previous research has suggested that bilingualism may improve cognition in children with autism, and that this boost may stem from improvement in executive functions. The Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children are considered to be reliable and valid measures of intelligence when administered to autistic children. These measures have so far revealed unusual psychometric properties in monolingual autistic children, notably distinctive patterns of strengths and weaknesses and low inter-correlation among verbal and nonverbal IQ subtests. The way bilingualism affects the intellectual functioning of autistic children has not been explored yet. Nor has there been a satisfactory factor structure that explains monolingual and bilingual autistic children’s IQ performance in terms of individual factors, such as age and socioeconomic status. The current study examined the intelligence profiles of 316 bilingual and age- and gender-matched monolingual children with autism using the Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children–Third Edition. The study applied clustering models to extract intelligence subtypes of autism, and mediation analyses to examine potential mediation effects of age and socioeconomic status on the children’s verbal and nonverbal IQ performance. The results support the mediational role of the children’s socioeconomic status in the association between bilingualism and intelligence. Low-socioeconomic status bilingual autistic children outperformed their monolingual peers on both verbal and nonverbal subtests, while the differences faded in medium-socioeconomic status and high-socioeconomic status children. The findings emphasize the positive effects of bilingualism on low-socioeconomic status autistic children’s intelligence and also highlight high-socioeconomic status as a factor that may mitigate discrepant patterns of strengths and weaknesses in monolingual children’s IQ performance.

Although a considerable number of studies have shown D(eterminer) elements, i.e. determiners and pronominal clitics, to be particularly vulnerable to impairment in monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), little is known about the use of appropriate or/and grammatically correct referring expressions in the children’s narrative production. Grammars of languages that differ in the way they encode and realize their D system may be viewed as the ideal context to disentangle the contribution of language (L1) transfer and morpho-syntactic impairment to reference use in the L2. The aim of the current study is to examine L1 effects in the use of referring expressions of 5- to 11-year-old Albanian–Greek and Russian–Greek children with DLD, along with typically developing (TD) bilingual groups speaking the same language pairs when maintaining reference to characters in their narratives. The three languages differ in their D elements, since Albanian and Greek have morphologically rich D systems in contrast to Russian, which lacks a definiteness distinction. Children produced oral narratives in Greek by using the Greek versions of two stories ( Cat and Dog) which have been designed within the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) tool of the COST Action IS0804. Results show that the groups did not differ in referential appropriateness. Regarding grammatical correctness, both groups with DLD produced more ungrammatical forms than TD children, while Russian–Greek children with DLD produced more ungrammatical article-less NPs than the other groups. The overall results reflect the joint contribution of language impairment and L1-specific typological properties in the definite forms used for character maintenance by bilingual children with DLD.