Sentence Comprehension and L2 Exposure Effects in 6‐Year‐Old Sequentially Bilingual Children With Typical Development and Developmental Language Disorder

What is already known on this subject Differentiating developmental language disorder (DLD) from typical language development (TD) is difficult in bilingual children. Assessment tools are needed for more reliable detection of disordered development. It has been shown that assessing both languages in bilingual children adds to the classification accuracy. The societal language is, however, often the only mutual language between the SLT and the child, and the only available tests are frequently in the child's L2. It has been found that substantial differences in second language (L2) performance between bilingual typically developing children (BiTD) and bilingual children with DLD (BiDLD) groups can be found in different language domains. Language exposure effects in BiTD and BiDLD children as well as classification accuracy of the L2 tests vary, however. What this paper adds to existing knowledge L2 sentence comprehension has received little attention in the field of communication disorders. In the current study, sentence comprehension tests showed substantial differences in L2 performance between bilingual TD and DLD children. On a group level, the effect of L2 exposure was small relative to some other language domains and appeared similar in BiTD and BiDLD children. Classification accuracy, however, depended greatly on exposure. In addition, it was found that some tests classify the children with more exposure better and some those with less exposure. Such patterns are related to the difficulty of the test items and the age range targeted by each test. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Sentence comprehension is a promising language domain informing the identification of DLD in bilingual children with different L1 backgrounds. Even though the BiTD and BiDLD groups differ significantly in their test performance, it is advisable to consider the possible differences in sensitivity and specificity of the test depending on exposure. In the domain of sentence comprehension, despite the persistent difference in performance between BiTD and BiDLD children, DLD children seem to be able to benefit from the exposure in a similar manner as TD children instead of lagging behind in the course of accumulating exposure.