5523V - Assessing Lexical Skills to Determine Language Development of Urban Bi/multilingual Preschool Children

A technical research session on determining the impact of exposure to two or more languages in 2;0-4;11-year-old bi/multilingual children, using a self-devised tool called Screener for Lexical Skills of Bilinguals (SLSB) that assesses their lexicon. Speech-language pathologists working with bi/multilingual children shall gain insights into a simple method of determining the status of a child’s language development through a measure of their lexicon. This research was conducted, in urban Pakistan, on typically developing children exposed to English in mainstream school, along with their native language and Urdu in the environment. The SLSB which consisted of 255 culturally appropriate pictures across twenty-one categories, provided an insight into the child’s semantic and morphological skills.