Perovic Alexandra, Levy Katie, Aertsen Inès, Baldacchino Andrea
Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, London SE6 4JF, UK.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2025 Jun 9;15(6):791. doi: 10.3390/bs15060791.
Despite the growing number of bilinguals worldwide, research on how bilingualism influences grammatical development in children with learning disabilities remains limited. This may be due to challenges in assessing language in these children, given the heterogeneity of their disabilities, lack of appropriate tools, and variability in language background and exposure common in bilingual populations. This pilot study investigates grammatical abilities in bilingual versus monolingual children with Down syndrome using the LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task, specifically designed for bilingual populations. Sentence repetition tasks are widely used for assessing grammar in neurotypical children and children with language impairments and are part of many omnibus language assessments. Ten children with Down syndrome aged 5-8 were recruited: five bilingual, speakers of British English and various home languages, and five monolingual, age- and language-matched. Both groups produced a high proportion of ungrammatical repetitions, with more omissions of verbs than nouns, function words than content words, and significant difficulties producing complex structures such as relative clauses, wh-questions, and passives. However, qualitative analyses showed that bilingual children speaking morphologically rich home languages (e.g., Polish, Greek) appeared to have fewer difficulties with some function words (e.g., prepositions) and were able to produce complex structures like passives and wh-questions, unlike their monolingual peers. Although the small sample limits generalisability, two insights emerge: First, sentence repetition may be of limited use in assessing expressive grammar in children with Down syndrome due to frequent ungrammatical responses. Second, while both groups showed similar challenges, bilingualism-especially with richly inflected home languages-may support specific grammatical skills. These findings support existing evidence that bilingualism does not hinder grammatical development in children with Down syndrome and suggest that parents should not avoid dual-language input. Further research is needed to determine whether bilingualism confers specific benefits in grammatical morpheme use and complex syntactic constructions.
尽管全球双语者的数量不断增加，但关于双语如何影响学习障碍儿童语法发展的研究仍然有限。这可能是由于评估这些儿童语言存在挑战，鉴于他们残疾情况的异质性、缺乏合适的工具，以及双语人群中常见的语言背景和接触情况的差异。这项试点研究使用专门为双语人群设计的LITMUS句子重复任务，调查了患有唐氏综合征的双语儿童与单语儿童的语法能力。句子重复任务被广泛用于评估神经典型儿童和有语言障碍儿童的语法，并且是许多综合语言评估的一部分。招募了10名年龄在5至8岁的唐氏综合征儿童：5名双语儿童，会说英式英语和各种母语，以及5名单语儿童，年龄和语言相匹配。两组儿童产生的不符合语法的重复比例都很高，动词省略比名词多，功能词省略比实词多，并且在生成复杂结构（如关系从句、wh疑问句和被动语态）时存在显著困难。然而，定性分析表明，说形态丰富的母语（如波兰语、希腊语）的双语儿童在一些功能词（如介词）方面似乎困难较少，并且能够生成被动语态和wh疑问句等复杂结构，这与他们的单语同龄人不同。尽管样本量小限制了普遍性，但有两点启示：第一，由于频繁出现不符合语法的回答，句子重复在评估唐氏综合征儿童的表达性语法方面可能用途有限。第二，虽然两组都面临类似的挑战，但双语，尤其是掌握形态丰富的母语，可能有助于特定的语法技能。这些发现支持了现有的证据，即双语不会阻碍唐氏综合征儿童的语法发展，并表明父母不应避免双语输入。需要进一步研究以确定双语在语法语素使用和复杂句法结构方面是否具有特定益处。
