2020.01.22 Dr. Sheng Li

Associate Professor

Communication Sciences & Disorders

University of Delaware

Profile

Developmental Language Disorder in Mandarin-Chinese Children: Behavioral Manifestation and Assessment Approaches

Seven percent of children are affected by developmental language disorder (DLD), which causes unexplained difficulties in learning one’s native (and subsequent) language(s). Our current understanding regarding the linguistic and cognitive profiles of DLD in Mandarin is extremely limited. This not only is incommensurate with the large number of Mandarin-speaking children affected by DLD, but also impedes the formulation of mechanistic explanations of DLD. In many English-speaking countries, the increase of Mandarin-English bilingual children far outpaces the number of practitioners who have the linguistic expertise to assess these children. Further exacerbating the matter is the complete lack of formal assessment tools for this population. In the first part of this talk, I present three studies that utilized both experimental and naturalistic tasks that measured executive functions, sentence comprehension, and narrative production in Mandarin-speaking children with and without risk for DLD. Children at risk for DLD showed deficits in all three task domains but within each task, there were subcomponents that were relatively intact. In the second part of this talk, I present findings from a feasibility study which suggested that parents of bilingual children may be reliable testing agent using an online testing platform. Together, these studies provide a richer description of the manifestations of Mandarin DLD, invite future investigations on the cognitive basis of DLD, and have implications for citizen science research and the development of accessible, cost-effective computer-mediated language assessment.