Identifying language impairment in bilingual children in France and in Germany.

Background: The detection of specific language impairment (SLI) in children growing up bilingually presents particular challenges for clinicians. Non-word repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR) tasks have proven to be the most accurate diagnostic tools for monolingual populations, raising the question of the extent of their usefulness in different bilingual populations.

Aims: To determine the diagnostic accuracy of NWR and SR tasks that incorporate phonological/syntactic complexity as discussed in recent linguistic theory.

Linguistic markers of specific language impairment in bilingual children: the case of verb morphology.

This study investigates verbal morphology in Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in German, focusing on past participle inflection. Longitudinal data from 12 German-speaking children with SLI, six monolingual and six Turkish-German sequential bilingual children, were examined, plus an additional group of six typically developing Turkish-German sequential bilingual children. In a recent study (Rothweiler, M.

Specific language impairment in Turkish: evidence from case morphology in Turkish-German successive bilinguals.

Language disorders, and Specific Language Impairment (SLI), have been extensively studied in a number of different, though thus far almost exclusively Indoeuropean, languages. For other languages such as Turkish, Vietnamese, or Arabic, however, findings on the outcome of SLI are rare. In this context, the growing number of migrant children in European countries with a variety of first languages can be seen as a challenge to linguistics and to language assessment: The lack of empirical findings on SLI in these languages brings up the question of how the impairment is manifested in bilingual children with a migrant background.