Specific language impairment in bilinguals

This information is taken from two sources in Hebrew, by Prof. Sharon Armon Lotem of Bar Ilan University in Israel.

Armon Lotem notes that 20% of children who began first grade in the mainstream education in 2004 came from a home in which at least one of the parents is not a native Hebrew speaker.  This is not surprising due to the fact that Israel absorbed a million jews from the former Soviet Union in the 1990's, and continues to absorb thousands of jews from various countries each year (26500 in 2014).  Israel's entire population was 8.3 million people in April 2015. This highlights the importance of discussing bilingual assessment issues.

First, a few definitions:

Simultaneous bilingualism:  both languages are acquired together.  A simultaneous bilingual child is raised in a bilingual home in which each parent speaks his native language.  Simultaneous bilingualism can also occur when the home is monolingual, the home language is different from the mainstream language, and the child is educated from a very early age in settings where the mainstream language is spoken.  These children begin to use both languages simultaneously.

Sequential bilingualism – one of the languages is acquired after the other.  The second language is learned not as a native language but a foreign language.

In this post, "an English – Hebrew speaker" means that the child's native language is English and second language is Hebrew (the first language is written first). 

SLI  - Specific Language Impairment  - a child with at least average IQ and poor linguistic ability (one standard deviation or more below the mean, or more than 12 month lower than expected for his age). The poor linguistic ability is not due to hearing impairment, emotional or behavioral difficulties, a proven neurological impairment, autism or severe articulation difficulties.  Seven to ten percent of the population (monolingual and bilingual) has SLI.

 BISLI – BILINGUAL SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT – children with poor linguistic ability in both languages.

 Anaphoric reference occurs when the writer refers back to someone or something that has been previously identified, to avoid repetition. Some examples: replacing "the taxi driver" with the pronoun "he" or "two girls" with "they".

  In general:

·         Monolingual tests in the second language are not suitable for the assessment of sequential bilinguals with less than four years of exposure to the second language.  Iluz – Cohen (2008) found that when bilinguals learning in special education kindergartens were reassessed in both languages, only five of 14 children were indeed diagnosed with SLI.

·         Using words of one language in the other language (code switching) is normal and is not an indication for SLI.

·         Research does not justify recommending that a BISLI child discontinue using one of the languages.  A developmental verbal delay is a marker for SLI and not a result of bilingualism.  Language intervention is more efficient when it's done in both languages.  Progress in one language facilitates progress in the other language.

·         For a bilingual child, the use of both languages is recommended both at home and at school.  Bilingualism has linguistic and cognitive advantages when it's balanced (the proficiency in both languages is more or less the same).

Developmental  knowledge and research findings from studies done with 5-7 year old children tested in Hebrew and compared to norms of monolingual Hebrew speakers.

Hebrew monolinguals with SLI	Bilingual English – Hebrew and Russian – Hebrew typically developing children	Bilingual  English – Hebrew and Russian – Hebrew BISLI children
Twenty percent of all children (monolingual and bilingual) have a vocabulary of less than 50 words by the age of 2.  Half the children close the gap by the age of 3.  The other half is diagnosed as SLI.  This is why having a vocabulary of less than 50 words by the age of 2 indicates the possibility of SLI.  In older ages, SLI monolinguals have poorer vocabulary than typically developing monolinguals.	This population has poorer vocabulary compared to monolinguals in each language, but an adequate vocabulary in both languages together.     The vocabulary of bilinguals contains representations of both languages and it's important to assess it in both languages.  Assessing vocabulary only in one  language can wrongly lead to SLI diagnosis.	Less than 50 words in both languages together at the age of 2 indicates  the possibility of SLI.  Older children  have  poor vocabulary in both languages together as well.	Vocabulary
Verb inflection difficulties.	A slight delay in the use of verb inflections (in simultaneous bilinguals).  The transfer of syntactic structures between languages (mainly in sequential bilingualism).   For instance, "the" does not exist in Russian, so the omission of "the" by a Russian – Hebrew bilingual when he speaks Hebrew is not an indication for SLI. Caution is needed in the interpretation of syntax errors in Hebrew by bilinguals.  If the sentence's syntax is correct in the native language, the child is not SLI.  Bilingual English – Hebrew or Russian – Hebrew children were able to correctly repeat complex sentences and dependent clauses in Hebrew.  Simultaneous bilinguals show better ability than typically developing monolinguals to tell stories.  They  use more descriptions and express  personal attitudes.  They  have better semantic development and a better understanding of metaphors  and double meanings than typically developing monolinguals.  These findings refer to children from average to high SES who are exposed to Hebrew for at least 50% of the time.  The amount and quality of exposure to Hebrew play a significant role.	Difficulties with verb inflections in the past tense, which  are similar to difficulties of SLI monolinguals.  This group also has difficulties  with verb inflections in the present tense, but performs better than SLI monolinguals in this task.  This means that bilingualism does not exacerbate the difficulties in verb inflections compared to monolingualism, and sometimes it even helps in Hebrew verb inflections. A lack of simple sentences by the age of three, at least in one of the languages, indicates the possibility of SLI.  A lack of complex sentences by the age of 3;6 at least in one of the languages indicates the possibility of SLI.	Verb inflections, syntactic structure
In a sentence repetition task, SLI monolinguals frequently omit  prepositions   ("my older brother listens loud music").		Monolingual SLI children omitted five times more prepositions   than English – Hebrew BISLI children.  Bilingualism doesn't exacerbate the difficulty in using prepositions   compared to SLI monolinguals.  It's possible that knowing English may have increased awareness of the need for prepositions.	Using prepositions (like "on"; "at") (I personally have lots of troubles with prepositions in English…)
Significant referencing errors.  For example, this is a story (according to a series of drawings) told by an SLI Hebrew monolingual child:  "Mom cooked food for her children and ate and ate.  Then came a fly.  Then  he got angry, than they put cookies in her tail, then they put something hot in her hair, then they cleaned her."  Who ate? Who put cookies?  To whom? Who put things in the hair? Who cleaned? The subject is missing in all of these sentences.  It's unclear who we are talking about.   It's also unclear to whom "he" "they" "her" refer.  This style is typical for SLI children.	This population had correct referencing skills.	English – Hebrew BILSI children have better referencing abilities than SLI Hebrew monolinguals.  SLI Hebrew monolinguals have three times as many mistakes as English – Hebrew BILSI children in story telling (according to drawings) in Hebrew.  In Hebrew it's possible to drop the sentence's subject, something that is not possible in English (you can't say "went"; you have to say "I went").   Thus, English – Hebrew BILSI children omit the subject less (when it's not correct to omit it).  English – Hebrew bilingualism helps SLI children.	Referencing

Three discoveries about bilingualism

Kroll, J. F., Dussias, P. E., Bice, K., & Perrotti, L. (2015). Bilingualism, mind, and brain. Annu. Rev. Linguist., 1(1), 377-394.‏

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-124937

This is an interesting rewiew in the new journal Annual Reviews of Linguistics.

For the purposes of this review, bilinguals are people who use more than one language actively and daily.  Bilingualism can occur in many different ways.  Early bilinguals are exposed to two languages from birth and continue to use both languages throughout their lives.  Late bilinguals acquire their 2^nd language only after early childhood, after their mother tongue has been firmly established. Both kinds of bilinguals can live in different environments: an environment in which their native language is dominant, an environment in which their 2^nd language is dominant or a bilingual environment.  A person who is bilingual in Hebrew and English (languages that differ greatly in their structure and their written scripts) is not like a person who is bilingual in English and Spanish or Hebrew and Arabic (Hebrew and Arabic are similar in syntax, grammar and vocabulary but not in written script).  Thus, there are large differences between bilinguals, depending on the age of acquisition of the 2^nd language, the extent to which each language is used, the environment one lives in, and the differences in the languages themselves.

Three discoveries about bilingualism have been made in the past few years.  These discoveries are true for all bilinguals, and they have shaped current research in this field:

1.     When bilinguals use one language, both languages are always activated.  When bilinguals listen to speech, read words and plan speech in either language – both languages are activated.   This means that the language the person is not using at that moment affects the language he is using, even when he is not aware of it.  Another implication is that both languages compete for cognitive resources, and that bilinguals have to control or regulate this competition so as not to wrongly use the language they didn't mean to use, and to preserve the fluency in the language they are using at the moment.  For this to happen, they have to be able to inhibit, at least to some extent, the language not being used at the moment (although it's still activated).

2.    Obviously the native language affects the 2^nd language.  But it seems that the 2^nd language (when we have good proficiency in it) also affects the native language!  This means that bilinguals don't function as two monolinguals.  The languages are not represented in the brain separately.  The interactions between the languages are bidirectional.  These interactions change the way bilinguals process each language.  Thus, bilinguals differ from monolinguals in the mother tongue too.

When a bilingual has to choose between two words or two syntactical/grammatical structures, one of which exists in both languages and the other exists only in one of the languages, he will usually prefer the structure or the word that exists in both languages.  As proficiency in the 2^nd language grows, the preferential use of structures or words that exist in both languages grows.  This is an example of one of the ways bilingualism changes the way we use each language.

3.    Using two or more languages has consequences that go beyond language processing.  It affects cognitive abilities in general.  Life as a bilingual affects a person's general ability to ignore irrelevant information, to switch between tasks and to resolve conflicting cognitive alternatives.

Brain scans of bilingual and monolingual Alzheimer’s patients who were matched for disease symptoms revealed that the brains of the bilingual patients were more diseased than those of monolingual patients. This comparison suggests that the active use of two languages protects bilinguals from the symptoms of the disease.  The researchers estimated that the bilingual patients were diagnosed with  Alzheimer's  4-5 years later than the monolingual patients. 

In many bilingual communities, speakers regularly switch from one language to another, often several times in a single utterance. This phenomenon is called code switching.  Code switching is a normal feature of bilingualism.  The ability to engage in fluent code switching is a hallmark of high proficiency in two languages, given that successful and fluent code switching requires a high degree of knowledge of and sensitivity to the grammatical constraints of both languages.

Code switching skills may benefit bilinguals' general cognitive abilities (I guess these skills can have a beneficial effect on executive functions, which require cognitive flexibility and set switching).  Indeed, bilinguals are more effective than monolinguals at conflict resolution within or across languages or within purely cognitive tasks.

What predicts success in second language acquisition? Or: babies know statistics! Part B.

 Frost, R., Siegelman, N., Narkiss, A., & Afek, L. (2013). What predicts successful literacy acquisition in a second language?. Psychological science,24(7), 1243-1252.‏  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3713085/

In the previous post I wrote about the hypothesis according to which second language acquisition is like any other learning process.  In any learning process we identify and perceive systematic and probabilistic structures in our environment.  Acquiring  second ( and first) language is mainly a process of acquiring and assimilating the statistical features of our linguistic environment.

Israeli researchers Frost, Siegelman, Narkiss  and  Afek, studied this hypothesis with American students at the overseas school of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  The students took part in the research during their first year of learning Hebrew as a second language.

Words in Hebrew are normally composed by intertwining a tri-consonantal root, which carries the core-meaning of the word, with word-pattern morphemes in which there are “open slots” for the root’s consonants to fit into.   The typical marker of reading Hebrew is sensitivity to the location of root consonants.   The writing system of Hebrew consists of letters that mostly represent consonants (thereby root information), while most of the vowels can optionally be superimposed on the consonants as diacritical marks (“points”). These points, however, are omitted from most adult reading material. Reading Hebrew fluently cannot be carried out by simply applying grapheme-phoneme conversion rules, but requires a deep understanding of the language. 

Reading Hebrew was assessed at the beginning and at the end of the school year by three tasks. The first monitored speed of decoding of pointed nonwords and reflected the assimilation of the characteristics of the Hebrew writing system. The second monitored accuracy in naming unpointed words, reflecting the implicit learning of Hebrew phonological word patterns. The third -- cross-modal morphological priming -- directly tapped the main marker of reading in Hebrew: the assimilation of the morphological root-based composition of words. 

The authors hypothesized that there will be individual differences in students'  ability to assimilate the structural features of Hebrew, and that these differences will be linked with the students' general ability to acquire and assimilate the statistical features of their environment.

  In order to study this hypothesis, the authored  employed a visual statistical learning (VSL) task  in which 24 relatively complex visual shapes   were presented in a consecutive stream that lasted about ten minutes. The 24 shapes were organized in eight triplets ("words"), which were presented in the 10-minute stream in random order.  Participants were not told that the stream was constructed of "words". However, following this phase, participants were presented with sets of 2 shape sequences :  one was a "word" that  appeared in the stream and the other was a "non-word" made of a sequence of three shapes that were taken from the stream, but did not appear in that order. Their success rate in distinguishing the "words" from the "non-words" reflected their implicit learning of the structure of the visual shapes within the stream. 

The results showed that participants who scored well in the VSL task, that is, picked up the implicit statistical structure embedded in the continuous stream of visual shapes, on average, scored well on the tasks that monitored the assimilation of the Semitic structure of Hebrew words! This suggests that a general non-linguistic faculty of statistical learning accounts, at least to some extent, for success in second language acquisition when the first and the second languages differ in their basic statistical properties. Such an outcome also implies that a simple and short test involving visual shapes could predict the speed of assimilating a new linguistic environment, even before the first foreign word has been learnt.