Using parental questionnaires to investigate the heritage language proficiency of bilingual children

We asked whether parental questionnaires on the heritage language proficiency of bilingual children might elucidate how proficient bilingual children are in their heritage language. We tested 20 UK-based Polish-English bilingual children between 4;5 and 5;9 years on Polish and English versions of the Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs). These comprise receptive and expressive picture tasks. Our bilingual group performed significantly worse on the Polish CLTs than on the English CLTs overall. They also performed significantly worse on the English CLTs than did an age- and gender-matched group of monolingual English-speaking children. Therefore our bilingual sample represent the type of bilinguals for whom education professionals have difficulty determining whether weak English is due to diminished English input versus an underlying Speech, Language or Communication Need. Parents of the bilinguals completed a Polish adaptation of the Children’s Communication Checklist 2. They also completed the Parents of Bilingual Children Questionnaire (PaBiQ), which includes Risk Factor measures (‘No Risk Index’ and children’s ‘Current Language Skills’). The PaBiQ also includes measures of the Amount and Length of Exposure to the majority language (English) prior to age four as well as the proportion of English in the current input. For the bilingual sample the CCC2 General Communication Composite (GCC), which measures structural language, significantly predicted Polish CLT production, uniquely accounting for 25% of the variance. The parent-rated PaBiQ ‘current Polish skills’ section predicted the Polish CLT comprehension. While the PaBiQ measure of Amount and Length of English Exposure was related to both Polish comprehension and production, it did not retain significance in a regression analysis. Therefore, parental questionnaires of the heritage language could provide a useful first step for education professionals when deciding whether to refer bilingual children for speech and language assessment. Large scale studies are needed to further develop these parental questionnaires

The utility of using translations of the Children’s Communication Checklist to detect language or communication delay in bilingual reception-class children

Around 5% of monolingual children have a speech, language or communication disorder (e.g. Boyle et al., 1996). The prevalence rate is expected to be the same in the bilingual community. The difficulty which teachers, GPs and health visitors in the UK face, however, is that there is currently no effective means of screening bilingual children accurately, especially if these children are dominant in their home language (e.g. Stow & Dodd, 2003). We asked, firstly, whether bilingual reception-class children might show delayed vocabulary development when assessed in English-only. Secondly, we investigated the utility of a translation of the ‘Children’s Communication Checklist’ (Bishop, 2003. This questionnaire was selected because most of the items do not depend on characteristics of particular languages. We assessed 22 Polish-English speaking and 21 monolingual English-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds on their receptive and expressive noun and verb vocabularies using the Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks. The bilingual children were assessed on both Polish and English variants of these tasks and the monolingual children were assessed on English only. We found that if we considered the English-only assessment, the bilingual group scored significantly below their monolingual English-speaking counterparts on every vocabulary test used. However, our key finding is that for the bilingual sample there was a strong, positive and highly significant relationship between the parent-rated Polish translation of the Children’s Communication Checklist global language composite score and total Polish production (conflated over nouns and verbs). Therefore, translation of the Children’s Communication Checklist may be a useful step in screening bilingual children