Attention in Bilingual Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot show that DLD causes attention problems or that bilingualism changes attention over time. The groups differed in nonverbal intelligence and maternal education, and the authors note that these differences may not have been fully captured in the models. Bilingualism was defined mainly from current language environment, and other factors, such as age of English exposure, may have confounded the comparison. Language grouping was difficult because the English test was normed for monolingual children and not for bilingual children, and the authors note that equating language ability across groups may be impossible. The sample was limited to children aged 6 to 8 years 11 months in the Chicago area, with no ADHD, sensory loss, brain injury, or other neurodevelopmental conditions, so findings may not apply to children with those histories. The final analysis included 109 children, and the DLD effects explained only 6.5 percent of variance for attentional control and 7.3 percent of variance for sustained attention. The study used one outcome score for each attention task, and the authors note that this may limit task reliability.

The funding statement reports National Institutes of Health Grant R03 DC013760 awarded to K. Ebert. The supplied text does not report a commercial sponsor or author conflicts of interest.

Do not conclude that bilingualism worsens attention or that these attention scores can diagnose DLD in one child. The study found no significant effect of bilingualism, no interaction between bilingualism and DLD, and only modest group-level differences for DLD. It was cross-sectional, so it cannot establish cause.