Language
School Success in Bilingual Kids with Language Disorders
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
While phonological awareness is the dominant predictor of academic and reading outcomes in typically developing children, evidence suggests it may not be the primary predictor of academic success in clinical groups, such as bilingual children with developmental language disorder, where rapid naming skills can be more predictive.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Bilingual children with developmental language disorder struggle academically across subjects, and their primary longitudinal predictor of academic success is rapid naming rather than phonological awareness.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
For children with developmental language disorders, rapid naming skills can serve as a stronger longitudinal predictor of academic success than phonological awareness, which typically predicts success in typically developing peers.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
While some evidence suggests that phonological awareness is the dominant cognitive predictor of reading and academic performance across general and typical student populations, longitudinal data from atypical populations (such as bilingual children with developmental language disorders) indicates that rapid naming skills can emerge as the unique predictor of long-term academic success instead.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Open questions
Tensions this paper is part of
From concept pages' “where studies disagree.” Disagreement means the same question; scope means different assays, populations, or outcomes.
While phonological awareness is the dominant predictor of academic and reading outcomes in typically developing children, evidence suggests it may not be the primary predictor of academic success in clinical groups, such as bilingual children with developmental language disorder, where rapid naming skills can be more predictive.
While some evidence suggests that phonological awareness is the dominant cognitive predictor of reading and academic performance across general and typical student populations, longitudinal data from atypical populations (such as bilingual children with developmental language disorders) indicates that rapid naming skills can emerge as the unique predictor of long-term academic success instead.
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