Study II--(ongoing analysis and manuscript submission)
Conducted at The Cambridge Hospital, this study investigated language competence, emotional/behavioral
problems, and related variables in a sample of 50 bilingual children consecutively referred for outpatient
psychiatric services and in close to 50 bilingual controls from a well-child clinic in pediatrics.
The main research questions were:
What is the prevalence of language deficits and disorders and their types (expressive, receptive, and mixed receptive-expressive)?
What is the relation between bilingual language competence and psychopathology?
The study had two aims:
to describe language deficit and disorder prevalence
to test the hypothesis that bilingual language skills and emotional/behavioral problems are associated in referred children
to systematically compare language profiles and language deficit and disorder prevalence between psychiatric cases and pediatric controls
The research questions formulated above have potentially important clinical and educational implications. The high rate of underdiagnosis of childhood language disorders (Toppelberg and Shapiro, 2000) may be even higher in this clinical population, if what appears as language delay is misattributed to normal bilingual development and if language evaluations are not conducted because of the belief that language tests for bilingual individuals are not available. If the commonly unsuspected receptive deficits were as common as in monolingual children, bilingual children would be even more seriously underdiagnosed and underserved.
Copyright 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
