Predictors of Reading Development Among School-Age Bilingual Children With Developmental Language Disorder: A Scoping Review.

PURPOSE: Systematic reviews of bilingual children's reading development are very limited, and none of which solely focus on predictors of reading difficulties among those with developmental language disorder (DLD). The present scoping review fills an important need by analyzing the recent research literature on the reading outcomes of bilingual children with DLD. Specifically, this study aims to identify predictors of reading difficulties among bilingual children with DLD to improve early identification. METHOD: The search parameters used in this scoping review included peer-reviewed journal articles written in English from 2000 to 2022 in order to synthesize the most recent empirical work, a focus on early childhood through early adolescent (pre-K to eighth grade) bilinguals with DLD, and research designs that included case study, descriptive, cross-sectional, quasi-experimental, longitudinal, and qualitative methods. RESULTS: The present review yielded nine articles, which all examined the predictive validity of either a measure or task with the ultimate goal of improving early identification of reading difficulties. Significant predictors of reading difficulties, such as rapid naming and blending in first language (L1), were found to aid in identifying bilingual children who have DLD. CONCLUSIONS: To conclude, this review demonstrates that this is a highly under-researched topic. To have ended up including only nine articles that fit the criteria of our search reveals a large gap in the research and a limitation of this review.

Contributions of Oral Narrative Skills to English Reading in Spanish-English Latino/a Dual Language Learners.

PURPOSE: The study examined the contributions of Spanish and English oral narrative skills to English reading among 95 early elementary dual language learners (DLLs) from Spanish-speaking homes in the United States. This sample of first- and third-grade DLL children attended Spanish-English dual language immersion programs and received language and literacy instruction in both English and Spanish. METHOD: All participants completed a storytelling task in both languages and two English reading tests in decoding and reading comprehension. The story narratives were analyzed for microstructures (number of different new words, lexical diversity [D], mean length of utterance, subordination index [SI]) using the Computerized Language ANalysis program. The narrative samples were also evaluated for macrostructures (i.e., discourse-level features) using the Narrative Scoring Scheme. RESULTS: Grade, English D, and Spanish SI significantly predicted English reading. Grade level was the strongest predictor of the three for both decoding and comprehension. However, Spanish SI was more robust than English D for decoding whereas English D was a stronger predictor than Spanish SI for comprehension. CONCLUSIONS: Young DLL children's oral narrative skills in English as well as in their home language Spanish contributed to their English reading outcomes. The study further specified the contributions of narrative elements to different reading skills. Microstructural elements appeared to play a stronger role in English reading than macrostructural elements for DLLs in dual language programs in early elementary grades. The results provided support for the simple view of reading and the linguistic interdependence hypothesis. The results also implicated that maintaining young DLL children's home language skills may be beneficial, rather than harmful, to their English reading development.

Teachers and Language Outcomes of Young Bilinguals: A Scoping Review.

Purpose The present scoping review seeks to fill an important need in the bilingual research and education community by analyzing the recent research literature on how teacher factors potentially influence young bilingual children's language outcomes. The research aims are twofold: synthesize the research findings on teacher factors that influence bilinguals' language development, and identify gaps in the literature to determine future research directions. Method The search parameters used in this review included peer-reviewed journal articles from 2000 to 2019 in order to synthesize the most recent empirical work on this topic, a focus on typically developing bilinguals from the age of 3 to 8 years, and research designs that included case studies, descriptive, cross-sectional, quasi-experimental, experimental, longitudinal, mixed methods, and qualitative methods. Results A search of major databases for studies on young bilinguals and teachers between 2000 and 2019 combined with multiple levels of screening and review yielded 21 peer-reviewed articles. Four major themes emerged: (a) teacher characteristics, (b) teacher quality, (c) teacher talk, and (d) teacher emotional support. Conclusions Overall, the results of this synthesis suggest that teachers do in fact influence the language development of young bilinguals. Teacher talk and teacher quality were found to be the two themes that were of most interest in the research community, and the results generally supported the positive effect of teacher quality and teacher talk on language outcomes among bilinguals, with some variability. This review has important implications for teacher training and education in an effort to better serve the growing population of bilingual children.

Effects of linguistic experience on the perception of high-variability non-native tones.

Whether tone language experience facilitates non-native tone perception is an area of research that previously yielded conflicting results, potentially because of the lack of systematical control of speaker normalization effects across studies. Under a high-variability testing condition with controlled speaker normalization cues, Cantonese (native controls), Mandarin (Cantonese-naive tone listeners), and English (non-tone listeners) listeners identified three Cantonese level tones. The results indicate a facilitatory effect of tone experience on non-native tone perception when normalization for inter-speaker variation is required.

Numerical morphology supports early number word learning: Evidence from a comparison of young Mandarin and English learners.

Previous studies showed that children learning a language with an obligatory singular/plural distinction (Russian and English) learn the meaning of the number word for one earlier than children learning Japanese, a language without obligatory number morphology (Barner, Libenson, Cheung, & Takasaki, 2009; Sarnecka, Kamenskaya, Yamana, Ogura, & Yudovina, 2007). This can be explained by differences in number morphology, but it can also be explained by many other differences between the languages and the environments of the children who were compared. The present study tests the hypothesis that the morphological singular/plural distinction supports the early acquisition of the meaning of the number word for one by comparing young English learners to age and SES matched young Mandarin Chinese learners. Mandarin does not have obligatory number morphology but is more similar to English than Japanese in many crucial respects. Corpus analyses show that, compared to English learners, Mandarin learners hear number words more frequently, are more likely to hear number words followed by a noun, and are more likely to hear number words in contexts where they denote a cardinal value. Two tasks show that, despite these advantages, Mandarin learners learn the meaning of the number word for one three to six months later than do English learners. These results provide the strongest evidence to date that prior knowledge of the numerical meaning of the distinction between singular and plural supports the acquisition of the meaning of the number word for one.

The effects of age on second language grammar and speech production.

The current study examined the age of learning effect on second language (L2) acquisition. The research goals of the study were twofold: to test whether there is an independent age effect controlling for other potentially confounding variables, and to clarify the age effect across L2 grammar and speech production domains. The study included 118 Mandarin-speaking immigrants and 24 native English speakers. Grammar knowledge was assessed by a grammaticality judgment task, and speech production was measured by native English speaking raters' ratings of participants' foreign accents. Results from the study revealed that the age of learning effect was robust for both L2 domains even after controlling for the influences of other variables, such as length of residence and years of education in the United States. However, the age of learning variable had a stronger impact on speech production than on grammar. The current results support the framework of multiple critical/sensitive periods (Long in Int Rev Appl Linguist 43(4):287-317, 2005; Newport et al. in Language, brain and cognitive development: Essays in honor of Jacques Mehler. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001; Werker and Tees in Dev Psychobiol 46(3):233-251, 2005).

The effect of age on the acquisition of second language prosody.

This study reports an exploratory analysis of the age of arrival (AoA) effect on the production of second language (L2) prosody. Three groups of Mandarin-speaking immigrants (N=10 in each group) with varying AoA in the United States and ten native speakers of English as controls participated in the study. All participants read a paragraph of English, and their speech samples were subjected to three prosodic analyses: speech and articulation rates, native speakers' judgment of the prosody based on segment-filtered speech, and analyses of tones and prosodic groupings using the Mainstream American English Tones and Break Indices (MAE_ToBI) transcription conventions. The L2 groups also filled out a survey providing information about their demographic background, English input, and socio-psychological aspects of language learning. The results revealed that the AoA factor impacted different aspects of prosody to varying degrees. Group differences were statistically significant for speech rate, degree of foreign prosody, the frequency of pitch accents, and the frequency of high boundary tones (H-H%). However,group differences were not significant for articulation rate, prosodic groupings, and the rest of the ToBI-labeled phonological categories. Multiple regression analyses further confirmed the AoA effect on degree of foreign prosody, the frequency of pitch accents, and high boundary tones (H-H%); AoA remained a significant predictor controlling for the effects of other variables. However, speech rate was predicted by English media exposure and motivation variable but not by AoA.

Classifiers as Count Syntax: Individuation and Measurement in the Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese.

The distinction between mass nouns (e.g., butter) and count nouns (e.g., table) offers a test case for asking how the syntax and semantics of natural language are related, and how children exploit syntax-semantics mappings when acquiring language. Virtually no studies have examined this distinction in classifier languages (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) due to the widespread assumption that such languages lack mass-count syntax. However, Cheng and Sybesma (1998) argue that Mandarin encodes the mass-count at the classifier level: classifiers can be categorized as "mass-classifiers" or "count-classifiers." Mass and count classifiers differ in semantic interpretation and occur in different syntactic constructions. The current study is first an empirical test of Cheng and Sybesma's hypothesis, and second, a test of the acquisition of putative mass and count classifiers by children learning Mandarin. Experiments 1 and 2 asked whether count-classifiers select individuals and mass classifiers select nonindividuals and sets of individuals. Adult Mandarin-speakers indeed showed this pattern of interpretation, while 4- to 6-year-olds had not fully mastered the distinction. Experiment 3 tested participants' syntactic sensitivity by asking them to match two syntactic constructions (one that supported the mass or portion reading and one that did not) to two contrasting choices (a portion of an object and a whole object). A developmental trend was observed for the syntactic knowledge from 4-year-old children into adulthood: adults were near perfect and the older children were more likely than the younger children to correctly match the contrasting phrases to the objects. Thus, in three experiments we find support for Cheng and Sybesma's analysis, but also find that children master the syntax and semantics of Mandarin classifiers much later than English-speaking children acquire knowledge of the English mass-count distinction.