Language Impairment in Bilingual Children: From Theory to Practice

Fourteen years ago I had the pleasure of guest editing an issue of Seminars in Speech and Language. As I again play the same role in this issue, I have reflected on changes that have occurred since, what we presently know, and what I wish we address in the coming decade. In a nutshell, we have moved from what my colleague J. Miller referred to as “the don't do this” period, where most of the articles advices speech-language pathologists (SLPs) not to do certain things, to the “do something” period in which articles have tended to be culturally and linguistically sensitive developmental studies and the presentation of valid approaches to assessment and intervention. What has been most amazing has been a shift from discouraging monolingual SLPs from being engaged in service provision to bilingual children (“You are not competent to touch our children!”) to one in which monolingual SLPs are encouraged to actively engage in the process (“We are all part of the solution!”).

Perhaps our greatest gains over these years have been in the area of assessment, in large part due to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and Institute of Education Sciences funding of critical projects that have significantly advanced the field. We now have a clearer view of what is normal development in bilingual children, new assessment tools been developed (Bilingual English Spanish Assessment, Contextual Probes of Articulation Competence-Spanish, Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts), and we have gained significant information on differences in language impairment markers across languages and scoring approaches that capture the distributed property of bilingual competence. Having available more reliable and valid measures of assessing bilingual children, the focus has gradually shifted to the development of interventions that take into consideration the children's bilingual environment and linguistic system. Central to the success of these interventions is a clear understanding of the child's social and communicative environment, as well as the child's cognitive and linguistic skills.

Although we have made some progress in various areas, our working theoretical models continue to be too simplistic and fail to capture the complex dynamic system in which the bilingual child is learning language. These more complex, data-driven models would provide us with a better understanding of how to understand the great variability seen in the bilingual population and would guide us on the best way to address the needs of language-impaired dual language learners.