speech delay and bilingual education

[Fred Genesee]

Beate:

It seems to be a widespread belief among speech and language therapists, not
all, that bilingual acquisition poses additional challenges to children with
language and other impairments. It is not clear where this belief comes from
because, in fact, there is not a lot of evidence on children with language
impairment who are raised bilingually.

However, the evidence that does exist does not support the recommendation to
drop one of the languages. Johanne Paradis, Martha Crago and I have
completed a
study of French-English bilingual children with SLI (using age-matched and
mlu-matched controls; monolingual and bilingual). We found that the impairment
of teh bilingual children was of the same nature generally as that of
monolingual children with SLI and, furthermore, it did not differ in severity
from that of monolingual children with SLI. In short, there was no evidence
from our study that bilingual exposure altered the nature or severity of these
children's impairment. In other words, it did not appear that their
exposure to
two languages was playing a causal role in their impairment.

As well, when one looks at the research on normal children who are raised
bilingually, there is the clear indication that dual language acquisition is
fundamentally the same as monolingual acquisition with the necessary proviso
that differences in the learning environments of bilingual children can impact
their language acquisition accordingly. Thus, children who have
inconsistent or
impoverished exposure in one of their two languages are likely to exhibit
poorer development in that language than in the other. In other words, the
research on normal bilingual acquisition indicates that the language
faculty is
capable of learning two languages as well as one, other things being equal.
This would lead me to believe that language impairment in bilingual
children is
not likely to be relieved by dropping one of the languages; impaired children
are likely to continue to exhibit problems in the remaining language. My
reading of the research suggests to me that language impairment is not
specific
to one or two languages but is fundamental to any and all languages that
impaired children learn.

Of course, it is dangerous and ill-advised to make specific recommendations
about indivdual children without detailed information about them and their
social environments. Children are all different and the circumstances in which
they learn and use their languages is different. The social and personal
fallout that comes from using two languages (or only one) must also be
considered seriously.  And clearly we have a lot more to learn about bilingual
language impairment -- it is probably not a unitary construct and we have only
just begun to understand even one form of it.

One final point with respect to the child you refer to, it sounds like he has
more than language problems, including cognitive and motor difficulties and,
thus, it is not clear how dropping one language would resolve the range of
challenges he faces.



Fred Genesee



At 08:55 AM 11/22/01 +0800, beate luo wrote:
>
> dear all,
>
> my friend, a German living in Greece, is educating her children bilingual.
> However, her 4 year old son's development is retarded (motor skills as well
> as cognition and speech) by about one year. He has started logotherapy two
> months ago. The therapist advised the mother to stop talking German to
him as
> this would negatively influence his development and would actually be the
> reason for his speech delay. His mother's Greek is not very good and to stop
> talking to him would influence their communication a lot. She asked me if it
> would be generally advised against bilingual education in the case of speech
> delay and if it wouldn't be possible to do the therapy in Greek but the
> exercises at home in German as she is doing it at the moment. As I am not a
> specialist in this field, I would like to forward her questions to you.
>
> This boy started to communicate orally only when he was already 2.6. His
> Greek was understandable only for his family until about September this
year.
> In German he is lagging far behind in pronunciation and grammar but his
> vocabulary is somewhat bigger than in Greek. His mother told me that her son
> is not learning by himself and needs a lot of practice. He'd never been
> asking a lot and seems not to be interested in new things. He used to be
very
> introverted but is now that he is going to kindergarden more open and
> socially active. There are still a lot of things he should know but still
> does not. Just a few days ago he learned the difference between day and
> night. To explain to him the differences between summer and winter has taken
> his mother several weeks. He as well needed a long time to learn the
names of
> colors. And he can use a word only in the context in which it appeared when
> he learned it. In another situation the same word has to be learned
again. He
> is not analyzing his speech but learning whole phrases. But his mother said
> that her impression was that he had no difficulties with the 2 languages as
> he can easily switch from one to the other and that he knows with whom to
> speak which language. She as well noticed that he could transfer what he had
> learned from one language to the other. She therefore is reluctant to
give up
> speaking German to him and has asked for advice. She is experiencing a
lot of
> pressure from the therapist, the kindergardenteachers and others who blame
> her son's speech delay to the bilingual education - something neither his
> mother nor I believe is true. As my friends family as well is not very
> supportive, she is now looking for advice from specialists.
>
> I would very much appreciate any information or reference I could forward to
> her. Thanks in advance.
>
>
> Sincerely yours,
> Dr. Beate Luo
>
> Feng-Chia University
> Foreign Lanuage and Literature Teaching Section
> Dept. of Humanities
> 100 Wen-Hua Rd.
> Hsi-Tun District, 407
> Taichung City
> Taiwan, ROC
> e-mail: <mailto:beate at fcu.edu.tw>beate at fcu.edu.tw
>
>



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