Language Acquisition in Bilingual Italian-speaking Preschoolers: Language Assessment when Only Italian is Possible to Test
Gianmatteo Farabolini
Bilingual language assessment is a core research question in order to figure out how to disentangle language difficulties due to language exposure features rather than to specific language difficulties in language processing. Moreover, in several countries as well as in Italy, bilingual children have several different native languages: it is hard for clinicians to know different native languages and administer native language tests. Scientific evidence underline that, together with a lexical assessment, analysis of language exposure features and family and personal story of the child, due neuropsychological tasks seem to be accurate to identify language difficulties in bilingual children. Non-word repetition lists explore phonological short-term memory in language processing; these tasks seem to sensible to identify language difficulties in bilingual children. Similarly, different authors have found that detecting and retelling principal elements of a narrative test are accurate tasks to disentangle bilingual children with and without language difficulties. In conclusion, together with a cognitive, linguistic and personal assessment, non-word repetition and narrative skills tasks can help to promote sensible and accurate language assessment in bilingual Italian-speaking children.
Keywords
Non-word repetition, Narrative skills, Bilingualism, Working memory, Clinical assessment, Speech and language therapy, Childhood.
