30 / 100
Prediction and Prognosis
29
JCPSLP
Volume 18, Number 1 2016
Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology
Chris Brebner
(top), Paul
McCormack
(centre), and
Susan Rickard
Liow
Thisarticle
has been
peer-
reviewed
Keywords
bilingualism
language
dominance
language
impairment
morphology
plurality
marking (Bedore & Peña, 2008; Kohnert, 2010) and such
variability is likely to be due to second language influence
and language dominance (Bedore et al., 2012). For
example, in Bland-Stewart and Fitzgerald’s (2001) study
of the use of Brown’s 14 morphemes in the Standard
American English of 15 bilingual Hispanic preschoolers,
they found use of the morphemes in English emerged in
a different rank order. They concluded that monolingual
English normative data should not be applied to bilingual
Spanish–English children.
For monolingual Standard English (StdE) speakers,
plural morphemes are acquired relatively early, emerging by
Brown’s stage II at approximately 30 months (Brown, 1973).
This early emergence does not apply to all children bilingual
in English. Jia (2003), in her longitudinal study of the
acquisition of English noun plural marking in 10 US-based
Mandarin–English successive bilingual children, found their
plural marking to be variable. Some participants showed
increased use of the morpheme over time, but did not
achieve full mastery. Others showed little increase in usage.
She concluded that plural marking for this population was
different to that of monolingual English speakers, with
language influence and dominance possibly explaining the
variability.
There are clearly implications for the accurate diagnosis
of language impairment in bilingual populations if using
similar assessment criteria to those used with monolingual
English speaking children. While marking of noun plurals
is usually acquired relatively early by monolingual English
speaking children, this may not be the case for bilingual
children. Language dominance is an important factor to
consider when considering the characteristics of a child’s
main language, especially as language dominance changes
over time depending on factors such as amount and type
of exposure, and the resultant impact on oral language
skills can vary.
The context for this study:
Singapore
Singapore is a multilingual, multicultural nation in South
East Asia. English is the language of education and
business, but there are four official languages: English,
Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, and both Singapore Standard
English (SStdE) and Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) are
spoken. Most Singaporeans are bilingual, and many are
multilingual (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2010).
SCE is the lingua franca in Singapore and the form of
Language dominance is an important
consideration in the assessment of bilingual
children’s language skills. This study
illustrates the impact of language dominance
on noun plural marking in English for
preschool English–Mandarin bilingual
Singaporean children. Spoken language
samples in English from 481 English–
Mandarin children (236 English dominant; 245
Mandarin dominant) were elicited using a
sentence-level picture description task.
Results indicated significant differences in
noun plural marking both for plural “-s” and
quantifiers in English for English-dominant
and Mandarin-dominant children. Importantly,
typically developing Mandarin-dominant
children did not use inflectional marking for
plurality by 6 years 8 months. The data
confirm that noun plural marking in English
among English–Mandarin bilingual
Singaporean children is impacted by
language dominance. This illustrates the
importance of obtaining accurate and
detailed information on language dominance
prior to assessment of children’s language
skills.
T
he assessment of oral language skills in bilingual
children is challenging because these children
are not a homogenous group (Bedore & Peña,
2008; Kohnert, 2010). To conduct valid and reliable
clinical assessments of bilingual children’s oral language
skills, clinicians need to understand bilingual language
development and each child’s individual context (Kohnert,
2010). This is particularly challenging for clinicians
in Australia as there are over 400 languages spoken
(Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012). There will potentially
be different influences on the English spoken by bilingual
children, and assessment processes for bilingual children
need to account for their skills in all of their languages.
There are known morphosyntactic differences between
the English spoken by bilingual and monolingual children,
including differences in inflectional morphology and tense
Implications of language
dominance for assessment
of bilingual children’s
language skills
Chris Brebner, Paul McCormack, and Susan Rickard Liow