Article published in:

Language Impairment in Bilingual Children: State of the art 2017
Edited by Theodoros Marinis, Sharon Armon-Lotem and George Pontikas
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 7:3/4] 2017
► pp. 331–358

Identification of bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment in France

Laetitia de Almeida | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Sandrine Ferré | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Eléonore Morin | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Philippe Prévost | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Christophe dos Santos | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Laurie Tuller | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Racha Zebib | Université François-Rabelais de Tours

Marie-Anne Barthez | Centre de Référence des Troubles du Langage et des Apprentissages de Tours

We report on the usefulness of three LITMUS tools in distinguishing bilingual children with SLI (Bi-SLI) from bilingual children with typical development (Bi-TD), in France: LITMUS-NWR-FR (non-word repetition), LITMUS-SR-FR (sentence repetition), and LITMUS-PABIQ (parental questionnaire). 82 bilingual children, aged 5–8, who had all been exposed to both French and either Arabic, Portuguese or Turkish, recruited both in ordinary schools and in SLP practices, were divided into Bi-TD (n = 61) and Bi-SLI (n = 21) groups based on parental questionnaire (LITMUS-PABIQ) information and standardized language scores in each language. Monolingual controls included 17 children with SLI and 37 TD children. NWR and SR significantly distinguished between the Bi-TD and the Bi-SLI children, and there was minimal impact of different factors related to bilingual development on children’s performance.

Keywords: Bilingualism, Acquisition, Specific Language Impairment

Published online: 06 February 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15019.alm

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