Sentence repetition as a measure of morphosyntax in monolingual and bilingual children

Abstract

Bilingual children are frequently misdiagnosed as having Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Misdiagnosis may be minimized by tests with high degrees of sensitivity and specificity. The current study used a new test, the School-Age Sentence Imitation Test-English 32 (SASIT-E32), to investigate sentence repetition in monolingual and bilingual children, and specifically to compare overall repetition accuracy and error patterns in the two groups. Eighteen English-speaking monolingual children (mean age= 8;8) and 18 Farsi-English bilingual children (8;2) participated. Monolingual children repeated sentences more accurately than bilingual children, but, once receptive vocabulary scores were taken into account, this group difference disappeared. However, the groups demonstrated a different pattern of errors, with the bilingual group producing a higher proportion of substitution and addition errors on function words compared to content words. The main error expected from children with SLI according to the existing literature, i.e. the omission of function words, did not characterize the bilingual children's performance. We therefore propose that the SASIT-E32 might prove to be a valuable tool in identifying SLI in bilingual children.

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