Purpose: There are well-established links between oral language and reading development in monolingual English-speaking children that are associated with literacy outcomes. Oral language, defined relative to lexical quality, provides key support for developing early reading skills. For bilingual children, the connection between oral language and reading development and risk for identification of having language or reading difficulties is assumed but has been less systematically studied. Our goal was to document the relationship between knowledge of semantics and morphosyntax and children's performance on letter and word identification in first grade in each of their languages so as to evaluate the risk for poor reading outcomes in the Spanish and English of bilingual first graders. Method: We examined data from 111 Spanish-English bilingual first graders on measures of Spanish and English semantics and morphosyntax in relation to letter-word identification, which indexes early reading development. We evaluated the within- and across-language relationships between skills and also whether the same children who performed in the at-risk range on the oral language tasks showed risk for future reading difficulties based on their letter-word performance. Results: Oral language skills and early reading skills were strongly related within languages, and cross-language relationships were also evident, though not for all domains. There were significant associations between risk for developmental language disorder (DLD) based on semantics performance and reading risk. Conclusions: We observe cross-linguistic relationships between letter-word identification and morphosyntactic and semantic skills in young Spanish-English bilinguals with and without risk for language and reading development. These findings indicate that connections between oral language and reading hold across differing levels of language and reading risk.

Research has investigated how lexical-semantic and participant factors impact word learning in young children and adults. However, limited information pertaining to expressive vocabulary development exists for school-aged bilinguals-particularly those with developmental language disorder (DLD). Cross-linguistic differences in the semantic characteristics of words may impact the types of cues available for constructing expressive vocabulary knowledge. To address this gap, we evaluated the relationships between intrinsic factors (age, language ability), extrinsic factors (L1 exposure), and word characteristics (e.g. imageability, concreteness) with item difficulty and expressive vocabulary knowledge in school-aged Spanish-English bilinguals with and without DLD. While we found similar patterns of associations between item difficulty and word characteristics across language ability groups, divergent predictive patterns emerged across languages and across ability groups. Educators supporting the development of bilingual students' expressive vocabulary knowledge must account for not only cultural differences across students, but also characteristics inherent to words.