The joint effects of bilingualism, DLD and item frequency on children's lexical-retrieval performance.

Background: Bilingual children and children diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD) are characterized by reduced lexical-retrieval abilities. Few studies examined their joint contribution and the mechanisms underlying these effects in the lexical domain.

Aims: To explore the joint effects of bilingualism and DLD by adopting a four-group comparison in which the difference between bi- and monolingual children with DLD is directly compared with that of bi- and monolingual children with typical language development (TLD).

What can errors tell us about specific language impairment deficits? Semantic and morphological cuing in a sentence completion task.

The lexical retrieval ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical language development was compared. Fifty Hebrew-speaking children participated: 15 school-age with SLI, 20 typically developing, matched on age to the SLI group and 15 younger, typically developing matched on naming performance to the SLI group. Participants were tested in a sentence completion task with semantic cuing and with morphological cuing.