The Impact of COVID-19 School Closures and Home Language on the Spanish and English Receptive Vocabulary Trajectories in Bilingual Children

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic and the home language on bilingual children’s receptive vocabulary in both languages. Method: 113 bilingual children between 4-8 years old with and without developmental language disorders (DLD) participated in the first year of the longitudinal study all with face-to-face (F2F) language assessment sessions. 102 of these children returned for sessions in the second year of the study (2019-2020), due to the COVID-19 pandemic 46 of these sessions were conducted F2F and 56 via telehealth. We examined change in receptive vocabulary scores in both languages, including the effect of the language spoken in the home. Results: Using multi-level models analysis, we predicted the raw scores for receptive vocabulary in each language including fixed effects for age, delivery, language spoken at home, and diagnostic classification and random effects for child. Results suggest that only age and diagnostic classification were significant predictors for receptive vocabulary in both languages. Conclusion: Results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic did not adversely impact children’s receptive vocabulary growth. Perhaps children were able to adapt from face-to-face learning to online learning for receptive vocabulary regardless of language spoken at home through other forms of exposure. It seems that suspension of learning due to COVID-19 was not long enough to impact receptive vocabulary growth. However, receptive vocabulary may be less sensitive to loss than other language measures not explored in this study.