אבחון רב־לשוני: שונות תוך־אישית כמאפיין מפתח

Speech and language pathologists in Israel regularly encounter the challenge of assessing and treating children and adults who come from diverse linguistic backgrounds. Accordingly, there is an ongoing clinical and research effort to develop and adapt appropriate assessment tools for this diverse population. The current paper highlights critical principles that should guide the assessment of language development and performance of multilingual children and adults. The approach advocated here is focused on linguistic performance at a given point in time, rather than language ability, and as such underscores inter-individual variability as a key feature in multilingual behavior. This approach is not new, but its influence within the clinical field to date is limited. Specifically, changing the balance and prioritizing performance range over ability in the context of multilingual assessment, allows one to acknowledge the dynamic nature of performance under different conditions and circumstances. In addition to the factors affecting language assessment in monolingual populations, this approach enables us to recognize the unique factors that contribute to dynamic performance and inter-individual variability in multilingual contexts. Specifically,the composition of linguistic stimuli used in language, meta-linguistic and cognitive assessment tools, is expected to significantly impact the level of cross-language influence and competition present at the time of performance, and the availability of language representations needed for task completion.Therefore, multilingual performance is expected to systematically vary as a function of stimulus composition. Furthermore, the language context in which a given task is being performed (the language used in the minutes preceding performance or the language of communication during the task), is also expected to impact multilingual performance. The current paper reviews studies demonstrating such effects, aiming to formulate practical guidelines for evaluation of this important diverse population.