Multilingual Children, Developmental Language Disorder, and Education: Scoping Review with ☸️SAIMSARA.

Name: SAIMSARA Evidence Object longevity::MULTILINGUAL_CHILDREN_SS
Creator: SAIMSARA
License: https://saimsara.com/license/

SAIMSARA

doi:10.62487/saimsaraafed5025

SAIMSARA Journal

Machine-Readable Science • ISSN 3054-3991

Multilingual Children, Developmental Language Disorder, and Education: Scoping Review with ☸️SAIMSARA.

Longevity & Public Health

Issue 2, Volume 1, 2026

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DOI: 10.62487/saimsaraafed5025

Editorial note

• Last update: 2026-06-06 10:43:25

What is this paper about

Multilingual children are often assessed and educated inside systems built around monolingual norms, creating real risks of misdiagnosis, lost heritage-language potential, and unequal educational support. This review shows where multilingualism becomes a clinical challenge, an educational resource, and a misunderstood developmental advantage worth reading in full.

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Abstract: This review aims to provide a comprehensive, structured synthesis of the contemporary scientific literature concerning multilingual children, identifying dominant research themes, methodological approaches, and evidence-based implications for clinical practice, education, and policy. The review uses 128 references and builds its evidence map from 264 original studies with 67506 total participants/sample observations (topic-deduplicated ΣN). This scoping review highlights a central tension between the multilingual realities of children and the predominantly monolingual systems that assess, educate, and support them, a signal that recurs across clinical, educational, and family domains. The evidence suggests that norm-referenced tools risk both over- and under-identification of developmental language disorder, while translanguaging pedagogies and recognition of heritage languages were consistently associated with stronger literacy, narrative, communication, and socioemotional outcomes. Multilingualism was also associated with selective cognitive advantages, including working memory gains in a large cohort and reduced autism symptom expression, though interference-control findings remained mixed. Practically, these patterns support workforce investment in dynamic, crosslinguistic assessment and family-centered, linguistically sustaining practice. Future research should prioritize longitudinal designs and validated assessment batteries across under-researched language pairs to clarify causal pathways and reduce diagnostic inequity for multilingual children.

Keywords: multilingual children; language assessment; developmental language disorder; speech-language pathology; heritage language; code-switching; multilingual education; language dominance; crosslinguistic non-word repetition; language attitudes

Review Stats

Final search date and database lock: 2026-05-28 21:47:41 CEST
Plan: Pro (expanded craft tokens; source: Semantic Scholar)
Source: Semantic Scholar
Total Abstracts/Papers: 3959485
Downloaded Abstracts/Papers: 1000
Included original and non-original Abstracts/Papers (all): 476
Included original Abstracts/Papers (Vote counting by direction of effect): 264
Reference Index (links used in paper): 128
Total participants/sample observations (topic deduplicated ΣN): 67506

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Reference Index (128)

[1] Translanguaging within and across learning settings: A systematic review focused on multilingual children with a migration background engaged in content learning — https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.70069
[2] Identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in multilingual children: A case study tutorial — https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2024.2326095
[3] Interactive Storytelling with Social Robots to Support Multilingual Children — https://doi.org/10.1145/3628516.3659377
[4] Implementing recommended approaches to assessing multilingual children’s speech — https://doi.org/10.1558/jmbs.24494
[5] Language and communication skills in multilingual children on the autism spectrum: A systematic review — https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613221147780
[6] The benefits of multilingual pedagogies for multilingual children’s narrative abilities — https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2022.2148675
[7] The role of service providers' linguistic backgrounds on assessment of multilingual children. — https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomdis.2023.106302
[8] Assessing the speech production of multilingual children: A survey of speech-language therapists in French-speaking Belgium. — https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.12875

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