Nonword repetition in bilinguals. Does performance differ from Developmental Language Disorder?

This study investigates the patterns in nonword repetition performance of children with a developmental language disorder and bilingual children. It has been shown by previous research that both children with developmental language disorder and bilingual children tend to perform poorly in nonword repetition tasks. As these tasks are one of the tools often used for diagnosing markers of DLD in young children, diagnosing bilinguals with DLD proves to be difficult, since both of the groups exhibit a poor performance. An analysis of the patterns found in NWR performance of bilingual children and children with DLD might shed more light onto the issue. The study focuses on analysing the performance in a widely used assessment task - The Children's Test of Nonword Repetition. Three samples of data were analysed. The first sample of data consisted of monolingual English-speaking children diagnosed with a developmental language disorder. The second sample of data consisted of Czech-English bilingual children from international schools in Prague who started acquiring English at the time of birth, i.e. simultaneous bilinguals. The third and final sample consisted of Czech- English bilingual children from international schools in Prague who started acquiring English after one year of age, i.e. sequential bilinguals...