Grasso Stephanie M, Peña Elizabeth D, Bedore Lisa M, Hixon J Gregory, Griffin Zenzi M
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, The University of Texas at Austin.
School of Education, The University of California, Irvine.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2018 Mar 15;61(3):619-633. doi: 10.1044/2017_JSLHR-L-16-0421.
Bilinguals tend to produce cognates (e.g., telephone in English and teléfono in Spanish) more accurately than they produce noncognates (table/mesa). We tested whether the same holds for bilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI).
Participants included Spanish-English bilingual children (aged 5;0 to 9;11 [years;months]), 25 with SLI and 92 without, who had comparable language experience. Cognate and noncognate items were taken from English and Spanish versions of the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (Brownell, 2000, 2001).
Although bilingual children with language impairment named fewer items correctly overall, they accurately named cognates more often than noncognates, as did typically developing children. Independent of language ability, accurate naming of a cognate in one language strongly predicted accurate naming in the other language.
Language impairment appears unrelated to the mechanism that produces a cognate advantage in naming accuracy. Given that correct performance for a difficult word in one language is associated with knowing its cognate in another, cognates may be particularly viable targets for language intervention in bilingual children with SLI.
双语者说出同源词（如英语中的telephone和西班牙语中的teléfono）时往往比说出非同源词（table/mesa）更准确。我们测试了这一情况对于患有特定语言障碍（SLI）的双语儿童是否同样成立。
参与者包括西班牙语 - 英语双语儿童（年龄在5岁0个月至9岁11个月之间），其中25名患有SLI，92名未患SLI，他们有相当的语言经历。同源词和非同源词项目取自《表达性单字图画词汇测验》的英语和西班牙语版本（Brownell，2000年，2001年）。
尽管患有语言障碍的双语儿童总体上正确命名的项目较少，但与发育正常的儿童一样，他们说出同源词的准确性高于非同源词。与语言能力无关，在一种语言中准确说出同源词强烈预示着在另一种语言中也能准确说出。
语言障碍似乎与在命名准确性方面产生同源词优势的机制无关。鉴于在一种语言中正确说出一个难词与在另一种语言中知道其同源词相关，同源词可能是对患有SLI的双语儿童进行语言干预的特别可行的目标。
