Abstract
This is an edited book of 12 chapters by 25 authors in total. It presents work from a network of researchers across Europe working together under the auspices of the European co-operation in science and technology (COST) Action IS0804 ‘Language impairment in a multilingual society: linguistic patterns and the road to assessment’. The group aimed to:
profile specific language impairment (SLI) by studying the linguistic and cognitive abilities of bilingual children with SLI across different migrant communities [and to] improve comparability and to provide innovative techniques for assessing language impairment.
The book is described by the editors as a first step in achieving these aims, presenting guidelines for developing assessment to distinguish between typically developing bilinguals and those with SLI.
Most chapters describe the development of a procedure to assess an aspect of language, ranging from very specific elements of syntax such as case-marking to the more over-arching sentence repetition and narrative. Further chapters describe procedures to measure executive function and use of parental questionnaires to collect information about developmental history, including the different languages spoken within and outside the home. The authors emphasize the need to assess across all the languages that a child speaks.
In each chapter there is an overview of the literature, discussion of relevant issues, a description of the task(s), and examples of stimuli from two or more languages. These descriptions differ in the level of detail given. Procedures and stimuli have been very carefully designed to be appropriate for young children and to be most relevant across a number of languages. Many tasks have been developed for computer presentation, allowing consistency of assessment procedure. However, the book does not provide materials or sufficient detail of procedures such that the tasks can be used by readers. Whilst stimuli for assessing children speaking English have been developed for all the tasks presented, the other languages for which stimuli have been developed has depended on which researchers have been involved in task development.
Some chapters present results from pilot testing to demonstrate that the task and stimuli are appropriate for children of the target age, and a few chapters also present data from children with SLI. No comparisons are made between SLI and typically developing multilingual children so sensitivity and specificity of the tasks for diagnosis of SLI has not yet been established. The final chapter summarizes potential procedures for diagnosing SLI in multilingual children. The difficulties identified include the lack of consistent criteria for diagnosis across different countries, and the lack of normative language assessment in many languages other than English.
The literature reviews provided in this book will be of interest to readers working in the field of multilingual language acquisition and with multilingual children who may be experiencing language difficulties. The discussions of the rationales provided for task design and stimuli selection will be informative for those involved in the design of language assessment, and the examples of stimuli of interest to those interested in the structure of different languages. A fairly detailed knowledge of linguistics is required to fully appreciate the complexities of assessment of different elements of syntax. Although there is insufficient detail to allow the tasks presented in the book to be used with children, nor is there normative data for comparison purposes, there is sufficient information for clinicians and researchers to use the tasks informally.