Magdalena Łuniewska

Purpose: This study examined cognate facilitation effects (CFEs) on accuracy and response times in noun production and comprehension among bilingual and monolingual preschoolers. Design: We used the Polish and Norwegian versions of the Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs). 14 Polish and 12 Norwegian cognates were selected based on expert judgments and normalized Levenshtein distance. Data and Analysis: The sample comprised 156 children aged 3–6 years: 52 Polish–Norwegian bilinguals and 52 monolingual speakers of each language. Accuracy and response times were analyzed as a function of group, cognate status, and age using mixed-effects logistic and linear models; additional models compared the bilinguals’ two languages. Findings/Conclusions: Bilinguals named cognates more accurately and faster than non-cognates in the Norwegian production task, with both effects significantly larger than in monolinguals. Cognates were also more accurate than non-cognates in Polish production and Norwegian comprehension, but these differences were not specific to bilinguals. No facilitation was found for comprehension speed in either language or for Polish comprehension accuracy. Direct within-bilingual comparisons provided no evidence that the cognate effect was stronger in the non-dominant language, Norwegian. Only in Norwegian production was the effect significantly larger in bilinguals than in monolinguals and significant only within the bilingual group. Originality: This is the first study to examine CFEs in Polish–Norwegian bilingual children alongside matched Polish and Norwegian monolingual controls, and one of the few to examine both production and comprehension in preschoolers. Significance/Implications: The study provides evidence of cognate facilitation in accuracy and response times in production in the children’s non-dominant language (Norwegian), consistent with cross-linguistic activation in the bilingual lexicon. Cognate–non-cognate differences in other tasks were not specific to bilinguals and therefore cannot be unambiguously attributed to cross-linguistic activation. The findings highlight the importance of considering cognates in bilingual assessment and, potentially, intervention.

Vocabulary assessment is an important part of measuring language proficiency in both monolingual and bilingual children. The LITMUS Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT) provides a framework for assessing the vocabulary of monolingual and bilingual children using a standardized procedure and comparable stimuli across languages. All language versions of CLT include picture naming and picture recognition tasks, using both nouns and verbs as target words. The present study demonstrates high reliability (internal consistency) and convergent validity of the Polish CLT (CLT-PL) in a monolingual sample of children between 3 and 6 years of age. We present data collected from 479 participants. Based on the analysis of the impact of children’s demographic characteristics on CLT scores, we developed a set of monolingual norms for children aged 3;0 to 5;11. We conclude that the CLT-PL is a reliable and valid tool for assessing vocabulary in monolingual children that could be applied in research and has the potential to serve as a diagnostic tool in the future. With this, we are one step further in designing tools for assessing the vocabularies of multilingual children learning Polish.

In this longitudinal study, we compare the age of reaching early developmental milestones in bilingual and monolingual children and between the bilinguals’ two languages. We present data from 302 Polish bilinguals (living outside of Poland with various majority languages) and 302 Polish monolinguals, aged M = 12.78 months on study entry (range: 0 – 24 months), matched on sex, age at study entry, duration of parental reporting, and parental education. The milestones under investigation include crawling, walking, babbling, first, 10th, 50th word, and first multi-word utterances. The data was collected with a specially designed mobile app, in which parents reported their children’s development repeatedly. Using this relatively big sample and looking at a wide range of investigated milestones, we present evidence that typical bilingual development follows a trajectory similar to monolingual development. We also evaluate the feasibility and usefulness of online data collection using mobile apps to study early language development.

Background: For over 30 years, parental reports have been used to study the vocabulary of children under 4 years of age. Research exploring parental checklists as a measure of vocabulary in older children is very limited. Typically, authors of parental checklists report the reliability of the developed tools but do not explore validity in terms of the agreement between parental assessments and the children's actual word knowledge.Aims: We aimed to explore the reliability and validity of a parental checklist for assessing vocabulary in children aged between 3 and 6 years. Furthermore, we aimed to evaluate the agreement between indirect (parental checklist) and direct (picture naming and picture recognition tasks) assessments of children's vocabulary.Methods and Procedures: A group of 94 typically developing monolingual Polish‐speaking children aged between 3 and 6 years were first directly tested onsite with picture naming and picture recognition tasks (Cross‐Linguistic Lexical Tasks). Subsequently, the participants’ parents completed an online checklist containing the same set of 128 items and marked all the words that they had ever heard in their child's spontaneous speech.Outcomes and Results: The parental checklist demonstrated very high internal consistency. The scores of the parental checklist and vocabulary tasks were moderately correlated. We compared the total number of words marked by parents and the number of items correctly identified by children in the picture naming and picture recognition tasks. In picture naming, we found no difference between the children's scores and the number of words selected by parents. However, parents selected significantly fewer words than children correctly recognised in the picture recognition task. When data were analysed at the level of individual items (i.e., whether parents selected exactly the same items that children answered correctly), we found that the level of agreement was low. The level of agreement correlated negatively with the children's vocabulary; that is, the more words a child knew, the lower the agreement between the direct measure and the parental checklist.Conclusions and Implications: Parental checklists should be used with caution in children aged between 3 and 6 years, especially if the assessed children have a large vocabulary and if item analysis is planned. Such checklists may be of more use in younger children or in children with limited vocabulary.WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on the subject: Parental checklists are commonly used to assess the vocabulary of children younger than 4 years of age. Previous research has indicated that parental checklists are reliable in terms of internal consistency and valid in terms of predictive and convergent validity. What this paper adds to the existing knowledge: This study introduces a parental checklist designed for assessing the vocabulary of monolingual Polish‐speaking children aged between 3 and 6 years. Statistical analyses reveal that while the parental checklist exhibits high reliability, and the scores on the checklist correlate with direct measures of vocabulary, the agreement between parental reports and direct vocabulary measures (i.e., validity) is notably low, particularly when examining individual test items. What are the clinical implications of this work?: These findings underscore the importance of exercising caution when using parental vocabulary checklists with children aged between 3 and 6 years. These checklists can serve as a replacement for direct vocabulary tests only when the general/overall score is needed. However, when specific words are the subject of interest, parental reports may not be a valid measure.

A long-standing issue in identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in multilingual children is differentiating between effects of language experience and genuine impairment when clinicians often lack suitable norm-referenced assessments. In this tutorial we demonstrate, via a case study, that it is feasible to identify DLD in a multilingual child using the CATALISE diagnostic criteria, Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) assessment tools, and telepractice. This tutorial features a case study of one 6-year-old Urdu-Cantonese multilingual ethnic minority child, and seven age- and grade-matched multilinguals. They were tested via Zoom using Urdu versions of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN), the Crosslinguistic Lexical Task (LITMUS-CLT), the Crosslinguistic Nonword Repetition Test (LITMUS-CL-NWR), and the Sentence Repetition Task (LITMUS-SRep). The child scored significantly lower in the LITMUS tests compared to her peers in her best/first language of Urdu. Together with the presence of negative functional impact and poor prognostic features, and absence of associated biomedical conditions, the findings suggest this participant could be identified as having DLD using the CATALISE diagnostic criteria. The result demonstrates the promise of this approach to collect reference data and identify DLD in multilingual children. The online LITMUS battery has the potential to support identification of multilingual DLD in any target language.

What is the relationship between literacy skills and implicit learning? To address previous mixed findings, we compared school‐aged readers, typical (CON, n = 54) and with dyslexia (DYS, n = 53), in relation to their performance on a serial reaction time task. For the first time, we also included an isolated spelling deficit group (ISD, n = 30) to control for distinctive effects of reading and spelling deficits. A linear reaction times analysis did not reveal between‐group differences in implicit learning. However, further examination revealed that most CON (65%) and ISD (63%) were implicit learners, whereas most DYS were nonlearners (64%). Brain activity showed differences in early learning phases: CON learners and DYS nonlearners activated the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and left insula more than other groups. Our findings imply that implicit learning is more frequently disrupted in children with dyslexia than in typical readers, and that activation of the left IFG and insula contributes to effective learning in the latter group but it does not in the former.