AThEME – Advancing THe European Multilingual Experience

Bilingualism & Dyslexia:

Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects

AThEME Project

AThEME (Advancing The European Multilingual Experience) is a 5-year collaborative research project (2014 – 2019) studying multilingualism in Europe with the aim of raising awareness of multilingualism among policy makers, health professionals, academics and educators. It volved researchers from 17 Universities and research institutions across 8 European countries to investiga cognitive, linguistic and sociological issues in multilingual Europe. My research within the AThEME Project focused in particular on the analysis of the interaction between bilingualism and developmental dyslexia.

Even though almost everyone is nowadays convinced about the importance of learning second languages and growing bilinguals, many more doubts arise about the opportunity to support bilingualism in a child suffering from a language or a learning impairment. Indeed, parents, teachers and educators often fear that bilingualism may have a negative impact on these disorders and may thus discourage bilingualism and foreign language learning in impaired children.

In order to see whether these doubts have an objective foundation, we have to find ways of investigating the effects of bilingualism on dyslexia. We tested four groups of children, monolingual and bilingual children, with and without a diagnosis of dyslexia, on a wide range of linguistic and cognitive tasks. Our first results seem to suggest that bilingualism does not have a negative impact on dyslexia; on the contrary, it can have a positive effect in some domains, as in morphological competence and executive functions, in which bilingual dyslexic children have been found to outperform monolingual dyslexic children, and even to match or to outperform monolingual typically developing children, at least in some of the conditions investigated.

These results thus confirm that the advantages that are typically associated to bilingualism extend also to dyslexia, suggesting that bilingualism could even be beneficial to dyslexia in these domains.

This constitutes an important indication for all the educators, speech therapists and teachers who think that bilingualism may have a negative influence on dyslexia and tend to provide bilingual families of dyslexic children with a negative advice with respect to the use of their home language, in order to avoid the alleged negative consequences of a condition of bilingualism on dyslexic children. Our results suggest that this is generally not the case: on the contrary, it seems that in some cases bilingualism can act as a positive, protective factor on dyslexia. The conclusion emerging from these results is thus that bilingualism can be always seen as an opportunity to catch, even in the case of communicative impairments and developmental language pathologies.

Project Publications

  • Melloni, C. and Vender, M. (2020). Phonological processing and nonword repetition: A critical tool for the identification of dyslexia in Bilingualism. In E. Babatsouli, M. J. Ball, Anthology of bilingual child phonology. Bristol: Multilingual Matters (309-333).
  • Vender, M., Delfitto, D., & Melloni, C. (2020). How do bilingual dyslexic and typically developing children perform in nonword repetition? Evidence from a study on Italian L2 children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23(4), 884-896.
  • Vender M., Krivochen D.G., Phillips B., Saddy D. and Delfitto D. (2019). Implicit Learning, Bilingualism, and Dyslexia: Insights From a Study Assessing AGL With a Modified Simon Task. Frontiers in Psychology, 10:1647.
  • Melloni, C., Vender, M. & Delfitto, D. (2019). Nonword Pluralization: Evidence for an Advantage of Bilingualism in Albanian-Italian and Romanian-Italian Bilingual Children. In R. Slabakova, J. Corbet, L. Dominguez, A. Dudley, A. Wallington (eds.), Explorations in Second Language Acquisition and Processing, (pp. 238-250). New Castle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-5275-2776-8.
  • Vender, M., Hu, S., Mantione, F., Delfitto, D. and Melloni, C. (2018). The Production of Clitic Pronouns: A study on Bilingual and Monolingual Dyslexic Children.  Frontiers in Psychology, 9:2301.
  • Vender, M., Delfitto, D. and Melloni, C. (2018). Clitic production and bilingualism: When exposure matters. Languages, 3, 1-17.
  • Vender, M., Hu, S., Mantione, F., Savazzi, S., Delfitto, D. and Melloni, C. (2018). Bilingualism, Dyslexia and Morphological Awareness: Evidence for an advantage of bilingualism in dyslexia. Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1–18. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2018.1450355.

Policy papers

Video