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Dr Maria Luisa Lorusso (IRCCS, Eugenio Medea): Assessment of developmental language and reading disorders in bilingual children

The Multilingual Mind: lecture series on multilingualism across disciplines

19.1.2021

Tuesday, 17.00 - 18.30 (CET/UTC+01)

Zoom room: zoom.us/j/94531600895

Abstract

Distinguishing between the effects of lack of linguistic exposure and a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting language or reading acquisition in multilingual children accessing clinical services can be a challenging task. Many factors contribute to the level of mastery of the two (or more) languages, positive or negative cross-linguistic interactions may occur at several levels and many variables must be taken into account in the assessment process. One of the most effective strategies to disentangle the various factors is assessing all the languages spoken and comparing performances, but practically this may be very difficult (both because very few clinicians have a perfect knowledge of more languages, and because tests and norms developed for the monolingual population could provide misleading results). Moreover, the differences existing between language structures and between orthographic systems make a simple transposition of tasks into various languages an unsatisfactory choice, whereas specific markers may represent more sensitive and reliable targets for assessment. A fully automatized system delivering language-specific tasks and providing a quantitative and qualitative description of the levels of performance across languages is being developed within the framework of  the MultMind project. The principles on which the system is based will be described, along with the first results from groups of bilingual children with typical and atypical oral and written language acquisition.