Pim Mak: Using the Visual World Paradigm for the diagnosis of DLD in bilinguals

Pim Mak

Title: Using the Visual World Paradigm for the diagnosis of DLD in bilinguals

Bilingual children are sometimes incorrectly diagnosed with DLD because during a certain phase of language acquisition they make errors in language production that are not distinguishable from those of children with DLD.

Several studies (e.g. Mak et al., 2017) have shown that in Visual World Paradigm (VWP) studies, bilingual children show the same results as monolingual typically developing children in the comprehension of the same linguistic structures that they make errors in. They thus show typical comprehension paired with non-targetlike production.

This opens the possibility to use the VWP as a diagnostic tool for DLD for this group. However, finding group differences does not necessarily imply being able to detect comprehension at the individual level. In this presentation, I will discuss the first attempts at using VWP to detect comprehension and non-comprehension at the individual level. I will discuss results from preferential looking data and from pupil size measurements. Although both measures are sensitive to differences in comprehension at the group level, only the preferential looking data appear to be reliable enough to detect differences at the individual level.

Mak, W.M., Tribushinina, E., Lomako, J., Gagarina, N., Abrosova, E., & Sanders, T. (2017). Connective processing by bilingual children and monolinguals with specific language impairment: Distinct profiles. Journal of Child Language, 44(2), 329-345. doi:10.1017/S0305000915000860

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