The utility of using translations of the Children’s Communication Checklist to detect language or communication delay in bilingual reception-class children

Around 5% of monolingual children have a speech, language or communication disorder (e.g. Boyle et al., 1996). The prevalence rate is expected to be the same in the bilingual community. The difficulty which teachers, GPs and health visitors in the UK face, however, is that there is currently no effective means of screening bilingual children accurately, especially if these children are dominant in their home language (e.g. Stow & Dodd, 2003). We asked, firstly, whether bilingual reception-class children might show delayed vocabulary development when assessed in English-only. Secondly, we investigated the utility of a translation of the ‘Children’s Communication Checklist’ (Bishop, 2003. This questionnaire was selected because most of the items do not depend on characteristics of particular languages.

We assessed 22 Polish-English speaking and 21 monolingual English-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds on their receptive and expressive noun and verb vocabularies using the Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks. The bilingual children were assessed on both Polish and English variants of these tasks and the monolingual children were assessed on English only. We found that if we considered the English-only assessment, the bilingual group scored significantly below their monolingual English-speaking counterparts on every vocabulary test used. However, our key finding is that for the bilingual sample there was a strong, positive and highly significant relationship between the parent-rated Polish translation of the Children’s Communication Checklist global language composite score and total Polish production (conflated over nouns and verbs). Therefore, translation of the Children’s Communication Checklist may be a useful step in screening bilingual children.