International journal of language & communication disorders
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Int J Lang Commun Disord · Jul 2005
Comparative StudyEarly lexical and syntactic development in Quebec French and English: implications for cross-linguistic and bilingual assessment.
Although a number of studies have been conducted on normal acquisition in French, systematic methods for analysis of French and normative group data have been lacking. ⋯ The findings have important implications for language assessment involving cross-linguistic comparisons, such as occurs in the assessment of bilingual children, and in the matching of participants in cross-linguistic studies. Given differences in the mean length of utterance and vocabulary scores across the languages, the finding of the same mean length of utterance or vocabulary obtained in the two languages for a given bilingual child or for monolingual speakers of the two languages does not imply equivalent levels of language development in the two languages.