Many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are reported to have word reading difficulties. However, previous research has focused mostly on monolingual children. The present study used two existing datasets to assess word reading outcomes of bilingual children with DLD. In Study 1, we compared word reading outcomes of monolingual and bilingual children with and without DLD (n = 93 monolingual DLD; n = 33 bilingual DLD, n = 42 monolingual TD; n = 74 bilingual TD). In Study 2, we compared those of monolingual (n = 91) and bilingual children with DLD (n = 51) on the basis of school record data. Findings from both studies show mean poor word reading outcomes and a high incidence of poor readers in the groups of children with DLD. Despite lower oral language outcomes of bilingual children in the mainstream language, reading outcomes of monolingual and bilingual children (with/without DLD) did not differ or outcomes were even better for the bilingual children. Overall, these findings indicate that DLD is a risk factor for word reading difficulties, while bilingualism is not.

据报道，许多患有发育性语言障碍 (DLD) 的儿童存在单词阅读困难。然而，以前的研究主要集中在单语儿童身上。本研究使用两个现有的数据集来评估双语 DLD 儿童的单词阅读结果。在研究 1 中，我们比较了有和没有 DLD 的单语和双语儿童的单词阅读结果（n  = 93 单语 DLD；n  = 33 双语 DLD，n  = 42 单语 TD；n  = 74 双语 TD）。在研究 2 中，我们比较了单语 ( n  = 91) 和双语 DLD ( n = 51) 基于学校记录数据。两项研究的结果都表明，在 DLD 的儿童群体中，单词阅读效果差，阅读差的发生率很高。尽管主流语言双语儿童的口语成绩较低，但单语和双语儿童（有/无 DLD）的阅读结果没有差异，或者双语儿童的阅读结果更好。总体而言，这些研究结果表明，DLD 是单词阅读困难的风险因素，而双语则不是。