Unraveling Individual Second-Language Acquisition in Late Bilingual Children With and Without Suspected Developmental Language Disorder: A Longitudinal Approach

Purpose: Research in bilingual language acquisition has experienced a shift toward more individual-focused analyses within longitudinal studies. The aim of the present study was to retrospectively investigate early markers for suspected developmental language disorder (DLD) in late bilingual children (onset after 5 years of age) with German as their second language. Method: The development of initially 62 children was followed over a period of 2 years. After an additional year, a diagnostic procedure was implemented to identify suspected DLD. Results: Results indicate that there are large individual differences in the second language acquisition of participating children. Although children suspected of having DLD scored below their peers on average in all measurement time points, there is no clear distinction between children with and without suspected DLD retrospectively. Only for nonword repetition does accuracy appear to be satisfactory, although it increases with length of exposure. Conclusions: The present findings are consistent with previous research and indicate a gap in studies investigating late bilingual language acquisition. Even after longitudinal observation and repeated testing, a clear diagnosis of DLD is not possible in all cases. We therefore suggest to use the term suspected DLD for those children.