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Bilingualism and processing speed (Park et al., 2020)

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posted on 2020-05-07, 20:23 authored by Ji Sook Park, Carol A. Miller, Teenu Sanjeevan, Janet G. van Hell, Daniel J. Weiss, Elina Mainela-Arnold
Purpose: The aim of the current study was to investigate whether dual language experience modulates processing speed in typically developing (TD) children and in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). We also examined whether processing speed predicted vocabulary and sentence-level abilities in receptive and expressive modalities.
Method: We examined processing speed in monolingual and bilingual school-age children (ages 8–12 years) with and without DLD. TD children (35 monolinguals, 24 bilinguals) and children with DLD (17 monolinguals, 10 bilinguals) completed a visual choice reaction time task. The Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, and the Expressive Vocabulary Test were used as language measures.
Results: The children with DLD exhibited slower response times relative to TD children. Response time was not modified by bilingual experience, neither in children with typical development nor children with DLD. Also, we found that faster processing speed was related to higher language abilities, but this relationship was not significant when socioeconomic status was controlled for. The magnitude of the association did not differ between the monolingual and bilingual groups across the language measures.
Conclusions: Slower processing speed is related to lower language abilities in children. Processing speed is minimally influenced by dual language experience, at least within this age range.

Supplemental Material S1. Generalized linear mixed-effects models for accuracy on the visual choice reaction time task.

Park, J. S., Miller, C. A., Sanjeevan, T., van Hell, J. G., Weiss, D. J., & Mainela-Arnold, E. (2020). Bilingualism and processing speed in typically developing children and children with developmental language disorder. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_JSLHR-19-00403

Funding

This research was supported by the University of Toronto Connaught Fund and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight grant (225180) awarded to Elina Mainela- Arnold (PI), a Penn State Social Science Research Institute grant awarded to Carol A. Miller (PI), and the Drs. Albert and Lorraine Kligman Fellowship at the Pennsylvania State University awarded to Ji Sook Park.

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