A battery of standardized language tests and control measures was administered to three groups of at-risk language learners – internationally adopted children, deaf children with cochlear implants, and children with specific language impairment – and to groups of second-language learners and typically developing monolingual children. All children were acquiring French, were matched on age, gender, and socioeconomic status, and were between age 5;0 and 7;3 at the time of testing. Differences between the at-risk and not-at-risk groups were evident in all domains of language testing. The children with SLI or CIs scored significantly lower than the IA children and all three at-risk groups scored lower than the monolingual group; the L2 and IA groups scored similarly. The results suggest that children with limited access to, or ability to process, early language input are at greater risk than children with delayed input to an additional language but otherwise typical or relatively typical early input.

Receptive standardized vocabulary scores have been found to be much higher than expressive standardized vocabulary scores in children with Spanish as L1, learning L2 (English) in school (Gibson et al., 2012). Here we present evidence suggesting the receptive-expressive gap may be harder to evaluate than previously thought. We compared the performance of 116 six-year-old Spanish–English bilingual children in the US to 30 monolingual Spanish-speaking peers in Mexico across two Spanish-language standardized picture naming tests and one standardized picture pointing test. The performance of 134 monolingual English-speaking peers was compared using similar English-language tests. Results revealed the presence and magnitude of a receptive-expressive gap was largely dependent on the tests used. These discrepant results likely exist because widely-used standardized tests do not offer comparable normed scores. We review possible test norming practices that may have contributed to these results and suggest guidelines to determine a meaningful receptive-expressive gap for bilingual children.

Adults and children learning a second language show difficulty accessing expressive vocabulary that appears accessible receptively in their first language (L1). We call this discrepancy the receptive–expressive gap. Kindergarten Spanish (L1) – English (L2) sequential bilinguals were given standardized tests of receptive and expressive vocabulary in both Spanish and English. We found a small receptive–expressive gap in English but a large receptive–expressive gap in Spanish. We categorized children as having had high or low levels of English exposure based on demographic variables and found that the receptive–expressive gap persisted across both levels of English exposure. Regression analyses revealed that variables predicting both receptive and expressive vocabulary scores failed to predict the receptive–expressive gap. The results suggest that the onset of the receptive–expressive gap in L1 may have been abrupt. We discuss possible mechanisms underlying the phenomenon.