Relationships Among Motor, First, and Second Language Skills Among Bilingual Children With Language Disorders

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the significance and directions of the relationships among oral and manual fine motor skills and lan-guage abilities among Spanish–English bilingual children. If such relationships exist, this would support a shared biological influence on motor and language development. Method: Participants included 56 bilingual children, 24 of whom met criteria for developmental language disorder (DLD), recruited based on teacher concern for language and/or reading comprehension abilities. Students participated in a bat-tery of baseline tests to determine motor, language, and cognitive abilities. Cor-relations among all variables were examined for direction of relationships. Regression models explored the predictive power of motor skills with Spanish and English language ability as the outcome measure. Results: Oral fine motor abilities (diadochokinetic rate productions of /pa/ and /pata/) predicted Spanish (but not English) oral language abilities in the expected direction (i.e., faster rates were associated with better language). Man-ual fine motor performance on computer tapping tasks was not related to per-formance in either language. Conclusions: Oral fine motor abilities are related to language abilities in bilin-gual children, but only for the native language. We did not find reliable differ-ences in oral and manual fine motor skills between groups of bilingual children with and without DLD. These findings support a limited role of shared biological influences on motor and language development.