The Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q) is a validated questionnaire tool for collecting self-reported proficiency and experience data from bilingual and multilingual speakers ages 14 to 80. It is available in over 20 languages, and can be administered in a digital, paper-and-pencil, and oral interview format. The LEAP-Q is used by researchers across various disciplines (Psychology, Neuroscience, Linguistics, Education, Communication Sciences & Disorders, etc.) to provide a comprehensive description of their bilingual participants, to substantiate a division of bilinguals into groups (e.g., early vs. late bilinguals), and to screen participants for adequate or threshold levels of language proficiency. Best practices for using the LEAP-Q include administration of the full questionnaire, consideration of acquisition and history of language use together with self-ratings of proficiency, and supplementation of self-reported data with objective language measures whenever possible. The LEAP-Q can be downloaded at no cost at https://bilingualism.northwestern.edu/leapq/.

Purpose: We aimed to outline the latent variables approach for measuring nonverbal executive function (EF) skills in school-age children, and to examine the relationship between nonverbal EF skills and language performance in this age group. Method: Seventy-one typically developing children, ages 8 through 11, participated in the study. Three EF components, inhibition, updating, and task-shifting, were each indexed using 2 nonverbal tasks. A latent variables approach was used to extract latent scores that represented each EF construct. Children were also administered common standardized language measures. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between EF and language skills. Results: Nonverbal updating was associated with the Receptive Language Index on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–Fourth Edition (CELF-4). When composites denoting lexical–semantic and syntactic abilities were derived, nonverbal inhibition (but not shifting or updating) was found to predict children's syntactic abilities. These relationships held when the effects of age, IQ, and socioeconomic status were controlled. Conclusions: The study makes a methodological contribution by explicating a method by which researchers can use the latent variables approach when measuring EF performance in school-age children. The study makes a theoretical and a clinical contribution by suggesting that language performance may be related to domain-general EFs.

Purpose: The authors examined the effects of conceptual scoring on the performance of simultaneous and sequential bilinguals on standardized receptive and expressive vocabulary measures in English and Spanish.Method: Participants included 40 English-speaking monolingual children, 39 simultaneous Spanish–English bilingual children, and 19 sequential bilingual children, ages 5–7. The children completed standardized receptive and expressive vocabulary measures in English and also in Spanish for those who were bilingual. After the standardized administration, bilingual children were given the opportunity to respond to missed items in their other language to obtain a conceptual score.Results: Controlling for group differences in socioeconomic status (SES), both simultaneous and sequential bilingual children scored significantly below monolingual children on single-language measures of English receptive and expressive vocabulary. Conceptual scoring removed the significant difference between monolingual and simultaneous bilingual children in the receptive modality but not in the expressive modality; differences remained between monolingual and sequential bilingual children in both modalities. However, in both bilingual groups, conceptual scoring increased the proportion of children with vocabulary scores within the average range.Conclusion: Conceptual scoring does not fully ameliorate the bias inherent in single-language standardized vocabulary measures for bilingual children, but the procedures employed here may assist in ruling out vocabulary deficits, particularly in typically developing simultaneous bilingual children.

The goal of the present work was to examine the effects of bilingualism on adults' ability to resolve cross-linguistic inconsistencies in orthography-to-phonology mappings during novel-word learning. English monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals learned artificially constructed novel words that overlapped with English orthographically but diverged from English phonologically. Native-language orthographic information presented during learning interfered with encoding of novel words in monolinguals but not in bilinguals. In general, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on the word-learning task. These findings indicate that knowledge of 2 languages facilitates word learning and shields English-Spanish bilinguals from interference associated with cross-linguistic inconsistencies in letter-to-phoneme mappings.