Cognitive effects of developmental dyslexia in bilingual children in Scotland: an experimental approach to inform inclusive evidence-based assessment

尽管国家统计数据报告了苏格兰学校中超过40000名双语儿童（国家统计数据，2018年），但DD的双语经历在当前的教育和公共卫生评估程序中并不存在，导致误诊或诊断不足。例如，如果双语儿童表现出学习困难，但没有得到适当的评估，这些可能归因于双语，强化了双语损害儿童语言发展的神话（Barac和Bialystok，2011;欧盟委员会，2018）。大多数关于阅读障碍的研究都是通过测试单语者进行的，并没有考虑到双语者的潜在差异因素。研究表明，双语儿童可能是很好的音素-字形解码器，由于他们的经验，两个不同的语音系统，导致增强语音意识（Bialystok，1988年;格雷戈里，1996年）。这可能意味着，虽然音素-字形转换缺陷主要见于患有阅读障碍的单语儿童（Snowling，1980），但双语儿童的DD可能与不同的认知过程有关。执行控制（EC）是一种调节各种活动的认知过程，因为它管理多任务执行的“选择，启动，执行和终止”（Rubinstein et al，2001：763）。执行功能参与阅读和理解技能的发展，因为它们监督阅读速度，凝视时间和词汇识别优先于词汇访问（布里顿和Glynn，2013）。然而，EC仍然在很大程度上未被探索的阅读障碍，少数研究，调查这种相关性只在单语的情况下这样做。鉴于EC在单语和双语过程中的作用，包括识字和理解技能，本研究将实施EC任务，以探索和比较参与者的表现。这些结果将进行比较，解码和语音生产性能，这是目前的评估模式的主要焦点。本研究旨在回答以下问题：1.双语学习困难儿童的EC表现与单语学习困难儿童和双语学习困难儿童的EC表现是否存在差异？2.双语障碍儿童的解码表现与其他组儿童的解码表现是否不同？3.基于EC的双语儿童评估是否识别出了基于解码的评估中未被注意到的缺陷？4.双语DD儿童是否优于单语DD儿童？研究方法研究对象研究对象为就读小一至二年级（5至7岁）的儿童。在这个年龄范围内，儿童将被分为三组，即（i）怀疑受DD影响的意大利/英语双语儿童，（ii）经评估患有DD的单语儿童，以及（iii）没有读写或理解困难的意大利/英语双语儿童。在双语能力方面，该研究将考虑从出生起就说意大利语和英语的儿童，以防止在很大程度上不平衡的能力扭曲结果。实验-本研究采用了一系列的EC实验，以探测DD的迹象，并将这些结果与解码为基础的任务。将通过快速命名任务（Meuter和Allport，1999; Everatt等人，2000）和任务转换测试（Rubinstein等人，2001;卡拉布里亚等人，2012）测试各组的EC。为了测试解码技能，将在阅读和说话任务中分析各组的言语产生，例如阅读和重复不同音节长度的真实的单词和虚构的单词，以研究音素缺陷（Snowling，1980; Snowling，1981）。

Despite national statistics reporting over forty-thousand bilingual children in Scottish schools (National Statistics, 2018), bilingual experiences of DD are not represented in current education and public health assessment procedures, leading to mis- or under-diagnoses. For instance, if bilingual children show learning difficulties that fail to be appropriately assessed, these may be attributed to bilingualism, reinforcing the myth that bilingualism impairs children's language development (Barac and Bialystok, 2011; European Commission, 2018). The majority of research on dyslexia was conducted by testing monolingual speakers and does not account for potentially differing factors for bilinguals. Studies show that bilingual children are likely to be good phoneme-grapheme decoders due to their experience of two different phonological systems resulting in enhanced phonological awareness (Bialystok, 1988; Gregory, 1996). This may mean that while phoneme-grapheme conversion deficits are predominantly seen in monolingual children with dyslexia (Snowling, 1980), DD in bilingual children may instead manifest in relation to different cognitive processes. Executive control (EC) is a cognitive process that regulates a variety of activities, as it manages "the selection, initiation, execution, and termination" of multiple-task performances (Rubinstein et al, 2001:763). Executive functions are involved in the development of reading and comprehension skills, as they supervise reading speed, gaze duration and prioritisation of word identification over lexical access (Britton and Glynn, 2013). However, EC has remained largely unexplored in relation to dyslexia, and the few studies that investigated this correlation only did so in a monolingual context. Research Questions Given the role of EC in monolingual and bilingual processes, including literacy and comprehension skills, this research will implement EC tasks to explore and compare the performances of the participants. These results will be compared to decoding and speech production performances which are the predominant focus in current assessment paradigms. The research aims to answer the following questions: 1. Do the EC performances of bilingual children with DD differ from the performances of monolingual children with DD and of bilingual children with no learning difficulties? 2. Do the decoding performances of bilingual children with DD differ from the performances of the other groups? 3. Does an EC-based assessment for bilingual children identify deficits which go unnoticed in a decoding-based one? 4. Do bilingual children with DD outperform monolingual children with DD? Methodology Participants The participants for this study will be children attending Primary 1-2 (aged 5-7). Within this age range, the children will be divided into three groups, namely (i) Italian/English bilingual children suspected of being affected by DD, (ii) monolingual children with assessed DD, and (iii) Italian/English bilingual children with no literacy or comprehension difficulties. In regard to bilingual proficiency, the study will consider children who were brought up speaking Italian and English from birth, to prevent largely unbalanced proficiency from skewing the results. Experiments The current study employs a series of EC experiments to probe for signs of DD and compare these results with those obtained from decoding-based tasks. The groups' EC will be tested through quick naming-tasks (Meuter and Allport, 1999; Everatt et al, 2000), and task-switching tests (Rubinstein et al, 2001; Calabria et al, 2012). To test decoding skills, the speech production of the groups will be analysed in reading and speaking tasks, such as reading and repeating real words and invented words of different syllable length to investigate phonemic deficits (Snowling, 1980; Snowling, 1981).