Considering bias in language assessment with bilingual children

Comparing the performance of bilinguals to monolinguals can introduce bias in language assessment. One potential impact is misidentification of developmental language disorder (DLD). Nonlinguistic cognitive processing tasks may reduce assessment bias because they measure underlying DLD weaknesses without relying on linguistic stimuli. This study examined the extent to which nonlinguistic cognitive processing tasks showed bias, compared to a traditional language assessment, sentence repetition. Participants were 161 five-to-seven-year olds from diverse language backgrounds who completed nonlinguistic auditory and visual assessments of processing speed, sustained selective attention and working memory. We examined psychometric properties and performance on each task among bilingual and monolingual children. We also conducted bilingual-to-bilingual comparisons to examine performance differences by first-language typology and exposure amount. Results suggest minimal assessment bias in the nonlinguistic cognitive processing tasks, particularly in comparison to sentence repetition. Nonlinguistic cognitive processing tasks may ultimately contribute to less-biased identification of DLD in diverse populations.