Tribushinina Elena, Boz Betül
Institute for Language Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2025 Jan 15;15:1521340. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1521340. eCollection 2024.
Both multilingualism and developmental language disorder (DLD) may be associated with inferior performance in the majority language, albeit for different reasons. At the same time, there is a growing body of evidence that multilingualism may have a positive effect on foreign language performance. This study tests the hypothesis that the positive effects of multilingualism on foreign language learning may be smaller in children with DLD compared to their multilingual peers with typical language development.
In a 2 × 2 design, we compare the effects of multilingualism and DLD on English as a foreign language performance and majority language performance of multilinguals and monolinguals with and without DLD. The participants were primary school children (aged 9-13) acquiring Dutch as the majority language and learning English as a school subject. English skills were measured with a vocabulary test, a grammar test and the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). Dutch skills were assessed with the Litmus Sentence Repetition Task and the MAIN task. The MAIN narratives in both languages were analyzed for fluency, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity and grammatical accuracy. The control variables included age, working memory, declarative memory, procedural memory and (for English) amount of extracurricular exposure and length of instruction. Data were analyzed by means of multilevel linear regression.
The results demonstrate that both multilingualism and DLD were associated with lower scores on the Dutch Sentence Repetition Task and lower grammatical accuracy of narratives. In English, the multilinguals outperformed monolinguals on all measures, except grammatical accuracy of narratives, and the interactions between Background and Group were not significant. Another strong predictor of EFL performance, along with the multilingual status, was extracurricular exposure to English.
多语能力和发展性语言障碍（DLD）都可能与在多数语言中的较差表现相关，尽管原因不同。与此同时，越来越多的证据表明多语能力可能对外语表现有积极影响。本研究检验了这样一个假设：与具有典型语言发展的多语同龄人相比，多语能力对患有DLD的儿童外语学习的积极影响可能较小。
在一个2×2设计中，我们比较了多语能力和DLD对多语者和单语者（有无DLD）的英语作为外语表现和多数语言表现的影响。参与者是小学儿童（9 - 13岁），他们将荷兰语作为多数语言，并将英语作为学校课程来学习。用词汇测试、语法测试和多语言叙事评估工具（MAIN）来测量英语技能。用石蕊试纸句重复任务和MAIN任务来评估荷兰语技能。对两种语言的MAIN叙事进行流畅性、词汇多样性、句法复杂性和语法准确性分析。控制变量包括年龄、工作记忆、陈述性记忆、程序性记忆以及（对于英语）课外接触量和教学时长。数据通过多层线性回归进行分析。
结果表明，多语能力和DLD都与荷兰语句重复任务得分较低以及叙事的语法准确性较低相关。在英语方面，除了叙事的语法准确性外，多语者在所有测量指标上都优于单语者，并且背景和组之间的交互作用不显著。除了多语状态外，课外接触英语是外语表现的另一个重要预测因素。
