Question about bilingual PWS
Hello, my name is Patricia and I’m a speech pathology grad student. Besides providing assessment and treatment in the language the client is most proficient in, how different can the process be in general for a bilingual client with a stutter? As a future bilingual SLP, is there any advice/tips when working with bilingual clients with a stutter? I have always heard to allow a client to mix vocabulary in both languages; however, clinicians should model the word in the primary language.
Hi Patricia!
Rather than getting theoretical, let me try and answer this from anecdotal experience. Living and working in India, every child I see is a bilingual (at least). In urban areas, we usually meet children who speak an Indian language at home, and are being taught English as a second language in school. So their basic vocabulary, such as names of objects, body parts, animals, etc. is taught to them in English, but their syntactic development is at an advanced stage in their native language. Things get even more complicated when they live in joint families, so they speak to their parents in English (using complete sentences) and their grandparents in their native language!
While it is very fascinating to see children develop both languages simultaneously and gradually develop separate registers to speak to their parents, nannies, grandparents and teachers, it might understandably confuse a beginning clinician which language to start with. The rule I usually follow is, choosing a language based on need, use and exposure.
So if the child needs, uses and is exposed to one of the two languages relatively more than the other, then I choose to use that language for teaching fluency techniques at sentence level. I might allow the child to use vocabulary such as “table” , “orange” etc in English, because those are the words taught in school, but I do not allow for mixing of syntax. So “The boy is running” in English becomes “Ladkaa bhaag rahaa hai” in hindi, and that is the target sentence. I do not model a mixed sentence such as “Ladka running kar raha hai” to the child.
For children who know the syntax of both languages equally well and the child needs, uses and is exposed to both almost equally, I assess fluency in both languages, and work on both simultaneously. Many times this is not even required… fluency gained in one language automatically generalizes to the other to a large extent.
The most important thing is to explain to parents that bilingualism does not CAUSE stuttering. It might, in some cases, be an exacerbating factor. So once the child gets some help separating out both languages, and adequate language stimulation in both, bilingualism no longer stands as a barrier to fluency, in my opinion.
I’m sure other experts will add their experiences with bilingual children as well!
Pallavi