No Bilingual Benefits Despite Relations Between Language Switching and Task Switching.

Previous research has shown that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tasks testing cognitive control. Bilinguals' enhanced cognitive control is thought to be caused by the necessity to exert more language control in bilingual compared to monolingual settings. Surprisingly, between-group research of cognitive effects of bilingualism is hardly ever combined with within-group research that investigates relationships between language control and cognitive control.

Narrative abilities of monolingual and bilingual children with and without language impairment: implications for clinical practice.

Background: Understanding and expressing a narrative's macro-structure is relatively independent of experience in a specific language. A narrative task is therefore assumed to be a less biased method of language assessment for bilingual children than many other norm-referenced tests and may thus be particularly valuable to identify language impairment (LI) in a bilingual context.

Aims: The present study aimed to investigate the effects of LI and bilingualism on macrostructural narrative skills.

A Quasi-Universal Nonword Repetition Task as a Diagnostic Tool for Bilingual Children Learning Dutch as a Second Language.

Purpose: This study evaluated a newly developed quasi-universal nonword repetition task (Q-U NWRT) as a diagnostic tool for bilingual children with language impairment (LI) who have Dutch as a 2nd language. The Q-U NWRT was designed to be minimally influenced by knowledge of 1 specific language in contrast to a language-specific NWRT with which it was compared.

Method: One hundred twenty monolingual and bilingual children with and without LI participated (30 per group).