The language development performances of turkishenglish sequential bilingual children living in England: An investigation in regard of risk for specific language impairment

The aim of this study was to determine the language development performances of bilingual children, whose mother tongue was Turkish and acquired English as a second language in England; on tests and assessment tools in both of their languages which were developed for diagnosing Specific Language Impairment (SLI) with bilingual children. The participant group of this study was composed of 20 bilingual children between 6:0-7:11 ages who live in London. In the study, a non-verbal intelligence test; and Turkish and English language development tests, sentence repetition tests and nonword repetition tests were used. In this study, a comparative and correlational research method was used on the basis of a descriptive research design. The relations within the results of assessment tools were examined and the differences between the performances of different age groups were tested. Results indicated that 95% of bilingual children got average or above the average scores at least in one of their languages, 85% of the children were more successful in Turkish compared to English; and only 25% of children got average or above the average scores in English, which is their second language. The analyses of the relations within the tests revealed that there were significant positive correlations between Turkish Early Language Development Test (TEDIL) and Turkish Sentence Repetition Test, and between Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF-4) and English Sentence Repetition Test. However, no significant relations were found between the tests that assess the same language properties in two languages. Results indicated that there was not a significant relation between non-verbal cognitive performance and language abilities. Also, the differences between the test results of different age groups were examined and statistically significant differences were not found in any of the test results. Key Words: bilingualism, specific language impairment, language development tests, sentence repetition test, non-word repetition test, language dominance