Toddlers who speak a language other than Dutch at home are often less proficient in Dutch when they start preschool. To spot a potential developmental language disorder (DLD) in this group, professionals need to take a multilingual perspective, says linguist Lisa Verbeek. Moreover, a strong foundation in the home language helps in learning Dutch. Verbeek will defend her PhD thesis at Radboud University on 13 December.
"Children with DLD have difficulty learning language, with no apparent cause," the researcher says. "We already knew that it is particularly important for children with DLD to have lots of language input. But if they speak a different language at home than at school, they get relatively less input per language. As a result, bilingual toddlers with DLD have difficulty both with their home language and with Dutch. The better their home language, the better they speak Dutch, which in turn helps them take the first steps towards learning to read in Dutch."
One in three children
Nearly one third of all Dutch children under five have at least one parent of non-Dutch origin and are therefore likely to grow up in a multilingual environment. Professionals such as child care workers and speech therapists therefore often have to deal with multilingual children. If a multilingual child does not yet have a good command of Dutch, it is not always clear whether they are suffering from DLD or simply still learning Dutch.
"The problem is that we now often focus on Dutch," says Verbeek. "But based on that, you can’t say much about the overall language development of a toddler who mainly speaks a different language at home." In her PhD thesis, she considers DLD from a multilingual perspective. She had some 200 toddlers perform language tasks. Some of them had Polish or Turkish as their home language.
Less proficient in the home language
DLD can be diagnosed in monolingual children when they are around three years old. They may, for example, start talking late, be hard to understand, or not know many words. But Verbeek’s research shows that multilingual toddlers with DLD, who mainly speak another language at home, know just as few Dutch words as multilingual toddlers without DLD. The difference is more evident in the home language: toddlers with DLD also know fewer words and are less intelligible in that language.
According to the researcher, it is good to test the home language at an early age if there is a suspicion of DLD. She previously collaborated on the development of the Speakaboo app, which helps professionals assess speech development in a language they do not speak themselves. Toddlers are invited to name pictures, for example of an elephant or a bicycle, in their home language. Professionals can compare the child’s pronunciation in the app with that of a native speaker. Children with DLD often have weaker pronunciation than their peers.
Home language helps with Dutch
To stimulate language development in toddlers with and without DLD, parents and professionals can do several things, says Verbeek. "They can read aloud more, and keep talking to and with their child a lot, for example outside or in the supermarket, even if their child says very little back. And if a child mispronounces something, they can repeat what he or she said, but in the right way.
With multilingual children, it is especially important that parents do so in the language they speak best, even if this is a language other than Dutch. If Polish parents think it is important for their child to learn Polish, they can, for instance, read Polish books to them or find a Polish babysitter. After all, if the child hears more Polish, it will promote language development in that language - which will also help them with Dutch."