Previous studies have shown that bilingual children typically score more poorly on nonword repetition (NWR) tasks than monolingual peers, which has been attributed to bilinguals’ lower proficiency in the language that the NWR task is based on. To enable fairer assessments of bilingual children, Cross-Linguistic NWR tasks (CL-NWR tasks) have been developed that are based on the linguistic properties of many languages. The aim of this study is to investigate whether young children’s performance on a CL-NWR is less dependent on existing knowledge of a specific language than performance on a Language-Specific (Dutch-based) NWR (LS-NWR). Bilingual and multilingual two- and three-year-olds (N = 216) completed a CL-NWR and LS-NWR, as well as a Dutch receptive vocabulary task. Parents reported the number of languages children spoke other than Dutch. Results of linear mixed-effect regressions showed that Dutch vocabulary scores related to performance on the CL-NWR task less strongly than to performance on the LS-NWR task. The number of non-Dutch languages spoken did not differentially relate to performance on the two tasks. These findings indicate that CL-NWR tasks – at least as used here – allow for more language-neutral NWR assessments within linguistically diverse samples, already at toddler age.

中文翻译：

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现有语言知识在双语和多语幼儿重复跨语言和特定语言非单词中的作用

先前的研究表明，双语儿童在非单词重复 (NWR) 任务上的得分通常比单语​​同龄人低，这归因于双语儿童对 NWR 任务所基于的语言的熟练程度较低。为了更公平地评估双语儿童，基于多种语言的语言特性开发了跨语言 NWR 任务（CL-NWR 任务）。本研究的目的是调查幼儿在 CL-NWR 上的表现是否比在特定语言（荷兰语）NWR (LS-NWR) 上的表现更依赖于特定语言的现有知识。双语和多语两岁和三岁儿童 (N = 216) 完成了 CL-NWR 和 LS-NWR，以及荷兰语接受性词汇任务。父母报告了孩子们说荷兰语以外的语言的数量。线性混合效应回归的结果表明，与 LS-NWR 任务的表现相比，荷兰语词汇分数与 CL-NWR 任务表现的相关性较低。说的非荷兰语的数量与这两项任务的表现没有差异。这些发现表明，CL-NWR 任务——至少在这里使用的——允许在语言多样化的样本中进行更多语言中立的 NWR 评估，这些样本已经处于蹒跚学步的年龄。