Language impairment in Swedish bilingual children: a comparison between bilingual and monolingual children in Malmö.

UNLABELLED: In this study two groups of children were compared, 192 bilingual and 246 monolingual, referred over a 12-mo period to University Hospital in Malmö for suspected language impairment. Compared with monolingual children, bilingual children ran a significantly lower risk (RR = 0.76, p < 0.0001) of being referred by a child health centre, and a significantly higher risk (RR= 1.54, p < 0.0103) of being referred after 5 y of age. In the bilingual group there was also a significantly higher risk of parental refusal of assessment (RR = 2.35, p < 0.0016) and of the children being diagnosed with a severe language impairment (RR = 1.87, p < 0.0009). The risk for bilingual children with severe language impairment being discharged owing to non-attendance was high (RR = 6.20, p < 0.0002) compared to monolingual children. The risk increased with severity of language impairment. CONCLUSION: Bilingual children displayed a higher risk of a diagnosis of severe language impairment and of being discharged for non-attendance. The problem of low compliance among bilingual parents, despite strong indications of parental distress, must be addressed.

Risk factors for language impairment in Swedish bilingual and monolingual children relative to severity.

AIM: To explore potential risk factors for language impairment (LI) relative to degree of severity in bilingual and monolingual children. METHODS: Two groups of clinically assessed children were compared, 252 bilinguals whose parents were both non-Swedish and 446 monolinguals, who were referred over a period of 24 mo to the University Hospital in Malmö for suspected LI. RESULTS: A multivariate linear regression for both groups showed that two risk factors were the same: parental distress (p < 0.0001 in both groups) and short attention span (p < 0.0001 in both groups). Male gender (p < 0.0001) was an additional predictor for LI relative to degree of severity in the monolingual group. Specific risk factors for LI relative to degree of severity in the bilingual children were maternal arrival within 1 y in relation to birth (p < 0.002) and parental need for an interpreter after > 5 y in Sweden (p < 0.040). CONCLUSION: Most risk factors for LI relative to degree of severity in this study seemed to apply to both groups, although they sometimes appeared in another form in the bilingual group. Gender and possibly also hereditary factors seemed to need to interact with environmental factors to appear as risk factors for the bilingual children in this study.

The acquisition of Swedish as second language in a group of Arabic-speaking pre-school children: word order patterns and phrasal morphology.

Children with Swedish as a second language (L2) and Swedish children with specific language impairment (SLI) have displayed interesting similarities in their linguistic development. A group of 18 normally developed Arabic-speaking children, five and six years old, were tested with respect to their development of word order patterns and phrasal morphology in the noun phrase. The results were in accordance with Pienemann's processability theory, that predicts the order of acquisition of both morphological and syntactical structures. The results on word order patterns showed similarities between L2 and SLI children. Processability theory could be a powerful tool in analyzing the grammar in children with SLI.