Language performance of sequential bilinguals on an Irish and English sentence repetition task
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Stanislava Antonijević-Elliott
Abstract
Currently there are no standardized language assessments for English-Irish bilingual school age children that would test languages in a comparable way. There are also no standardized language assessments of Irish for this age group. The current study aimed to design comparable language assessments in both languages targeting structures known to be challenging for children with language impairments. A sentence repetition (SRep) task equivalent to the English SRep task (Marinis, Chiat, Armon-Lotem, Piper, & Roy, 2011) was designed for Irish. Twenty-four typically developing, sequential bilingual children immersed in Irish in the educational setting performed better on the English SRep task than on the Irish SRep task. Different patterns were observed in language performance across sentence types with performance on relative clauses being particularly poor in Irish. Similarly, differences were observed in error patterns with the highest number of errors of omission in Irish, and the highest number of substitution errors in English.
Abstract
Currently there are no standardized language assessments for English-Irish bilingual school age children that would test languages in a comparable way. There are also no standardized language assessments of Irish for this age group. The current study aimed to design comparable language assessments in both languages targeting structures known to be challenging for children with language impairments. A sentence repetition (SRep) task equivalent to the English SRep task (Marinis, Chiat, Armon-Lotem, Piper, & Roy, 2011) was designed for Irish. Twenty-four typically developing, sequential bilingual children immersed in Irish in the educational setting performed better on the English SRep task than on the Irish SRep task. Different patterns were observed in language performance across sentence types with performance on relative clauses being particularly poor in Irish. Similarly, differences were observed in error patterns with the highest number of errors of omission in Irish, and the highest number of substitution errors in English.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
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Part I. LITMUS in typical bilingual development
- MAIN story comprehension 13
- How oral texts are organized in monolingual and heritage Russian 47
- A case study of a quadrilingual child 77
- Lexical diversity in bilingual speakers of Croatian and Italian 99
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Part II. Using LITMUS for identifying SLI (DLD)
- Language performance of sequential bilinguals on an Irish and English sentence repetition task 131
- Identification of bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment in France 169
- Effects of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and bilingualism on verbal short-term memory 197
- The influence of different first languages on LITMUS nonword-repetition and sentence repetition in second language French and second language German 227
- Phonology and sentential semantics 263
- Crosslinguistic nonword repetition and narrative performance over time 301
- Index 329
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
-
Part I. LITMUS in typical bilingual development
- MAIN story comprehension 13
- How oral texts are organized in monolingual and heritage Russian 47
- A case study of a quadrilingual child 77
- Lexical diversity in bilingual speakers of Croatian and Italian 99
-
Part II. Using LITMUS for identifying SLI (DLD)
- Language performance of sequential bilinguals on an Irish and English sentence repetition task 131
- Identification of bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment in France 169
- Effects of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and bilingualism on verbal short-term memory 197
- The influence of different first languages on LITMUS nonword-repetition and sentence repetition in second language French and second language German 227
- Phonology and sentential semantics 263
- Crosslinguistic nonword repetition and narrative performance over time 301
- Index 329
