Comparing morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic competence in Polish-English bilinguals: Toward a Language-neutral assessment

Abstract

Abstract Evidence that certain semantic and pragmatic skills follow a similar developmental trajectory cross-linguistically suggests an important role for semantic-pragmatic tasks in the assessment of bilingual children. This study investigates whether quantifiers constitute a language-neutral linguistic category in this context. Forty-three Polish–English bilingual children aged 4–7 years completed the Quantifier Comprehension Task (QCT) and the Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG-2), a standardized morphosyntactic assessment, in both languages. The results indicated that children’s performance on QCT is strongly correlated between their two languages. This correlation was significantly stronger than that observed for the TROG-2, indicating that quantifier comprehension may be less language dependent than general grammar comprehension measures. These findings highlight the diagnostic value of semantic-pragmatic tasks, particularly quantifier interpretation, in evaluating bilingual language development. While the children in this study are all typically developing bilinguals, our goal is to explore whether quantifier comprehension tasks can support the development of language-neutral tools for assessing bilingual language skills.