Nonword repetition in Czech-English bilingual children. Parallels with developmental language disorder

Bilingual children may display language difficulties that are, at times, misunderstood as a language impairment. Previous work has suggested that nonword repetition tasks may be used to disentangle difficulties related to bilingualism from difficulties related to developmental language disorder (DLD), since the patterns observed in these two groups may be different: specifically, DLD children were shown to be more prone to errors related to nonword length and to be more sensitive to the presence of phonological clusters. This study offers some preliminary data on a new sample of children, Czech-English sequential bilinguals, and it compares their performance to that of English DLD children (both groups were assessed with an English task). Contrary to previous studies, in this sample, groups did not differ in performance: both bilinguals and children with DLD in fact displayed a main effect of length (long nonwords were repeated less accurately), and a main effect of cluster (nonwords containing clusters were repeated less accurately). These findings suggest that the use of nonword repetition to disentangle bilinguals from children with DLD shall be exerted with caution and may not extend to all language pairs.