School Success in Bilingual Kids with Language Disorders
Bilingual children with developmental language disorder struggle academically compared to peers, and their school success is best predicted by early rapid naming skills rather than phonological awareness.
Source
Academic Outcomes in Bilingual Children With Developmental Language Disorder: A Longitudinal Study
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Longitudinal primary-school follow-up of DLD vs typically developing bilingual peers
- N
- N=28 · 14 DLD and 14 typically developing Spanish-Catalan bilinguals from age six
- Population
- Bilingual Spanish-Catalan children starting primary school
- Outcome
- School grades and cognitive predictors of academic success
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School Success in Bilingual Kids with Language Disorders
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Twenty-eight children in the total sample
Twenty-eight children participated in this longitudinal study.
beginning age of six years
A group of trained undergraduate students of advanced academic courses and graduates in Psychology administered all tasks of the NEPSY at the children’s schools at the beginning of the first course of primary education, at the age of six.
What they did
The researchers conducted a longitudinal study tracking Twenty-eight bilingual Spanish-Catalan children from the beginning of primary school at the age of six. Fourteen participants had developmental language disorder, and 14 were typically developing controls. The study measured cognitive processing skills at the age of six and tracked school grades across primary school.
What they found
Children with developmental language disorder received lower grades than controls in most subjects, with differences increasing in language-heavy areas. Grade retention was highly common, with 57% of children with language disorders repeating a grade. For children with developmental language disorders, rapid naming was the unique predictor of academic success, explaining 37.4% of the variance, whereas phonological awareness explained 53.6% of the variance in the control group.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study's findings are limited by a very small sample size of only Fourteen children per group, meaning the results may not generalize broadly. Additionally, the regression analyses show correlation rather than direct causation, so we cannot conclude that poor rapid naming directly causes lower grades. Finally, the researchers used a syllable-level task instead of a more sensitive phoneme-level task to measure phonological awareness, which may have limited their ability to detect subtle differences between the groups.
Key terms
- Developmental Language Disorder
- A persistent language delay affecting daily communication and learning that is not explained by other medical, genetic, or intellectual conditions.
- Specific Language Impairment
- An older, more exclusive diagnostic label for language delays that strictly required normal non-verbal intelligence scores.
- Rapid Automatized Naming
- A processing task requiring the fast retrieval of phonological codes from the lexicon by naming visual stimuli under time pressure.
- Phonological Awareness
- The conscious awareness of the sound structure, such as syllables and phonemes, of spoken words.
- Orthographic Depth
- The degree of consistency and correspondence between written letters (graphemes) and spoken sounds (phonemes) in a language.
- Grade Retention
- An educational practice where a student repeats an academic year or grade due to academic difficulties.
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How did the researchers in this longitudinal study handle diagnostic criteria to address contemporary debates about comorbidity?
Common questions
Why did the researchers study Spanish-Catalan bilingual children specifically?
Most prior research on academic outcomes in children with language disorders was conducted with monolingual English speakers. Since Spanish and Catalan are much more orthographically transparent (easier spelling-to-sound rules) than English, the authors wanted to see if the predictors of academic success would differ in this linguistic and educational environment.
Did children with developmental language disorders perform poorly in all subjects?
No, they did not perform significantly worse in physical education or mathematics. Their difficulties were most pronounced in language-heavy subjects, such as Catalan, Spanish, English, and science, where the linguistic demands are much higher.
Why was rapid naming a better predictor of grades than phonological awareness for the language disorder group?
In highly transparent languages like Spanish and Catalan, learning basic spelling-to-sound rules (phonological awareness) is relatively easy. However, reading fluency and comprehension still depend heavily on the speed of lexical access and processing, which are measured by rapid naming tasks.
Did school accommodations like curriculum adaptations help the children with language disorders succeed?
The study suggests these measures were highly inadequate. Only a small fraction of children received curriculum adaptations, and those who did also repeated a grade, indicating that schools struggled to provide effective support within the inclusive classroom setting.
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