PRIMARY LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT IN A CONTEXT OF MULTILINGUAL SOCIETY

Abstract

In European countries there is an increasing number of children who speak more than one language before entering elementary school. At the same time, often a level of proficiency in the country's langauge is not good enough. The worse level of the language proficiency in which the children will be educated later can be viewed at a first glance as a clinical language symptom of children with primary language impairment or language impairment. Due to this overlapping in the language of multilingual children during an assessment, this can lead a specialist to a misleading diagnosis. Very often, these bilingual children are labeled as children with primary language impairment. Because of this very real situation, a unique European project started running under the European Science Foundation (ESF). The main aim within the frame of this project was to try unify diagnostic criteria for speech and language diagnosis processes of bilingual children with primary language impairment. At the same time, to also try to find diagnostic tools which will be more sensitive in language assessment, as well as the evaluation of bilingual children. In the four working groups, tasks were created for narrative assessment, phonological processess and verbal memory, vocabulary and executive functions. The project also created the proposal of a questionnaire for mapping the bilingual situation in a family. From the final report it is clear that bilingual children with primary language imapirment have language difficulties in both languages. Bilingual children with language impairment also show a similar level of impairment compared to the language impaired monolingual children.

Keywords

• bilinguism
• primary language impairment
• language impairment
• crosslinguistics lexical task
• narative
• iso 804 cost project