A Comparative Study of Chunking Skills in Bilingual Children and Monolingual Children with and without Specific Language Impairment

Objectives:This study investigates the differences in linguistic and nonlinguistic chunking skills between Korean-English bilingual children and Korean monolingual children with and without specific language impairment. Methods: A total of 64 children (Mono TD= 22, Mono SLI= 16, BI TD= 26) between 4 to 6 years of age participated in this study. Linguistic chunking skills were assessed by wordlist recall task. Nonlinguistic chunking skills were assessed by symmetric-asymmetric matrix task. Results:There were significant main effects in group, condition type, and span in both the symmetric-asymmetric matrix task and Korean word list recall task. Also, there were significant main effects in word order, and span in the English word list recall task. Among the tasks, word order conditions in wordlist recall task were correlated with vocabulary skills of Mono TD, whereas Mono SLI showed correlation between conditions in symmetric-asymmetric matrix task and their vocabulary skills. BI TD showed relatively lower correlation between language ability and chunking skills compared to Mono TD. Conclusion: Children with SLI had difficulty in utilizing the chunking ability efficiently compared to Mono TD and BI TD in both linguistic and nonlinguistic chunking tasks.The episodic buffer to integrate working memory, long-term memory and language processing systems appears to be lower in SLI. However, there were no significant differences between Mono TD and BI TD. Since the episodic buffer reflects the language-based processing ability, TD groups' chunking skills were not affected by the bilingualism.