Research has focused mainly on the specific language impairment (SLI) in monolingual children. This article focuses attention on the SLI in bilingual children. The study was conducted with bilingual children from Luxembourg and monolingual children from Portugal who all had Portuguese as their first language. The bilingual group performed equally well compared with their peers on measures of visuospatial working memory but had lower scores than both control groups on tasks of verbal working memory. The authors’ results support the position that SLI is not a language specific disorder. In fact, bilingualism may represent a protective factor against some of the cognitive limitations associated with SLI in monolinguals.
Specific language impairment in bilingual vs monolingual children
Reviewed by Gauri Mankekar
Specific language impairment in language –minority children with low income families.
CONTRIBUTOR
Gauri Mankekar
Department of Otolaryngology-Head Neck Surgery, Louisiana State University Shreveport, Louisiana, USA.
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