Taking bilingualism into account in speech-language pathology screening: Towards better identification of bilingual preschoolers

It is a challenge for speech-language pathologists to identify developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children since bilingual children with typical development (TD) assessed in just one language may not perform as well as their unilingual peers. The objective of the project is to evaluate the effects of adapting language acquisition benchmarks and assess how much exposure to French the bilingual TD children have had based on the Milestones en fran & ccedil;ais du Qu & eacute;bec (MilBec) questionnaire given to parents. The items were divided into two subscales according to whether the item is related to general language skills (GLS subscale) or to an element more specific to the French language (FL subscale). The performance of unilingual children with TD or DLD is compared to that of bilingual children with TD who have either high or low exposure to French. The results indicate that unilingual children with DLD perform poorly on both subscales. The performance of all TD children is similar on the subscales, but more bilingual children with little exposure to French perform poorly on the FL subscale. When analyzing their performance, these results underscore the importance of considering which linguistic benchmarks are assessed and the degree of exposure bilingual children have had to the language.