Semantic Difficulty for Bilingual Children: Effects of Age, Language Exposure, and Language Ability.

purposeSemantic tasks evaluate dimensions of children's lexical-semantic knowledge. However, the relative ease of semantic task completion depends on individual differences in developmental and language experience factors. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how language experience and language ability impact semantic task difficulty in English for school-age Spanish-English bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD).

methodParticipants included 232 Spanish-English bilingual children in second through fifth grade with (

resultsResults showed that language ability and grade level drive semantic task difficulty for all task types, and children with DLD experienced greater difficulty on all task types compared to their typically developing peers. Longitudinally, semantic task difficulty decreased for all children, regardless of language ability, indicating that semantic task types became easier over time. While children made gains on all semantic tasks, the growth rate of task difficulty was not equal across task types, where some task types showed slower growth compared with others. English language exposure emerged as a significant predictor of semantic task difficulty while age of acquisition was not a significant factor.

conclusionsThis study clarifies developmental profiles of lexical-semantic performance in bilingual children with and without DLD and supports clinical decision-making regarding children's English language learning.