Abstract
Language skills in young bilingual children are highly varied as a result of the variability
in their language experiences, making it difficult for speech-language pathologists
to differentiate language disorder from language difference in bilingual children.
Understanding the sources of variability in bilingual contexts and the resulting variability
in children's skills will help improve language assessment practices by speech-language
pathologists. In this article, we review literature on bilingual first language development
for children under 5 years of age. We describe the rate of development in single and
total language growth, we describe effects of quantity of input and quality of input
on growth, and we describe effects of family composition on language input and language
growth in bilingual children. We provide recommendations for language assessment of
young bilingual children and consider implications for optimizing children's dual
language development.
Keywords
Bilingual - language - assessment - input
