Assessment of oral and written language and neuropsychological profile in bilingual children. Reference data for primary school

Diagnosis of specific learning disorders in children who learn Italian as a second language (L2) through tests standardized for Italian children increases the risk of false positives. An alternative is to develop normative data for children learning Italian as L2. The present paper provides reference data for tests of reading, spelling, oral language and cognitive skills to support the assessment of minority bilingual children who learn Italian as L2. The cut-offs indicative of clinical attention in bilingual children were calculated from a sample of 307 bilingual children in function of the grade attended (from 1st to 5th grade) and the age of exposure at L2 (early vs late).