Description

Background: Both monolingual and bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrate subtle deficits in areas of cognitive processing, such as: sustained selective attention, working memory and processing speed. Measuring the presence of cognitive processing deficits in the nonlinguistic domain may offer an opportunity for less-biased assessment within linguistically diverse populations. The purpose of the present review is to provide a basis for understanding how cognitive processing skills may be assessed. Method: Currently available assessments measuring sustained selective attention, working memory and processing speed in children (ages 3-10) were identified. The strengths and weaknesses of each tool for assessment in bilingual populations were considered. Results: Sustained selective attention can be measured in tasks that ask the child to monitor a stream of stimuli and respond to targets. One currently available measure, the Test of Variables of Attention, Version 9 (T.O.V.A. 9; Greenberg; 2011), develops a score for sustained attention, whereas the Conners Continuous Performance Test Third Edition (Conners CPT 3; Conners, 2014) embeds assessment of attention into more complex cognitive areas such as inhibition. Working memory is commonly assessed linguistically by remembering a series of words while performing some mental operation. Assessments in the nonlinguistic domain are less common, but can involve replicating a series of pictures previously seen. Measures of children’s processing speed, such as subscales of common neuropsychological assessments (e.g., NEPSY-II; Korkman et al.,2007; Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-5th edition, WISC-V; Wechsler, 2014) frequently infer processing speed from language-based tasks or more complex visuomotor tasks. Conclusions: Cognitive processing skills may be important to consider in language assessments. However, pure measures of each skill are rare and the linguistic nature of the majority of the assessments may deem them ill-suited for use with bilingual children. Future work is needed to develop nonlinguistic assessments of cognitive processing skills that can help identify language disorders across both bilingual and monolingual children.