Abstract
To address concerns regarding the utility of language measures that depend on linguistic knowledge to distinguish English language learners from those with developmental language disorder, this study compared the performance of Arabic-speaking English language learners with diverse language experiences to the performance of age-matched monolingual children with and without developmental language disorder on processing-dependent measures. The group of 6- to 9-year-old English language learners (n = 59) whose first language was Arabic, and who had been learning English as the language of instruction in Canada, and two monolingual groups from Saudi Arabia, typically developing Arabic-speaking children (n = 369) and Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder (n = 52), completed processing-dependent measures of short-term and working memory. No differences were found between the groups of English language learners and typically developing children on the short-term and working memory measures, with the exception of the Arabic nonword repetition task. The performance of the English language learners group was comparable to that of the Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder group on the Arabic nonword repetition task and significantly lower than the typically developing group. The English language learners group scored significantly higher than the typically developing and Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder groups on only the digit recall subtest. The findings suggest that processing-dependent measures may be valid assessment tools that minimize the role of linguistic knowledge and experiences.