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Purpose: This study documents the risk for language impairment in Latino children who had different levels of exposure to English and Spanish.
Method: A total of 1,029 preschool- and kindergarten-age children were screened in the domains of semantics and morphosyntax in both Spanish and English. Parent report was used to document current exposure to and use of Spanish and English, as well as year of first exposure to English. Risk for language impairment was compared for language group, year of first English exposure, age, and mother's education.
Results: While bilingual children's scores on each subtest were significantly lower compared to their functional monolingual peers, they were no more likely to fall in the atrisk range based on a combination of all 4 subtests. Maternal education and year of first English exposure were weakly associated with risk for language impairment but not with language group (via 5 levels of first and second language exposure).
Conclusions: Prevalence of risk for language impairment when both languages are tested is not related to language group.
Key Words: screening, bilingual, language, impairment, risk
There is a critical need to develop language performance measures that are appropriate for testing young bilingual children. According to a 2008 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, 21% of the U.S. school-age population speaks a language other than English at home, and this proportion is expected to double by 2030 (Davis & Bauman, 2008). Approximately one third of these children (7% of the total school enrollment) are English language learners (ELLs; U.S. Department of Education, 2006). Children who speak Spanish as a home language compose 79% of the bilingual and ELL children in the United States (Goldenberg, 2008; U.S. Department of Education, 2008).
Research demonstrates that language experience is directly related to language development in young children (e.g., Hart & Riseley, 1995). Compared to monolinguals whose input is concentrated in one language, bilingual children receive less input in each language they are learning. They also have less practice using each language compared to monolingual children, regardless of whether they learn the two languages simultaneously or successively. Because bilingual children have less in-depth experience with each language they speak, some parents and professionals believe that they are at increased risk for language delay (Kohnert, 2008; Kohnert,...