Introduction: Bilingual children with SLI – the nature of the problem

Abstract

The demographic changes in the Western world in the last two decades have led to rapid growth in the number of children being raised bilingually, and in many locations they represent a majority of the school population. With this increase in the number of bilingual children, researchers as well as educators and practitioners, face a diagnostic dilemma which arises from similarities in the linguistic manifestations of child second language (L2) acquisition and of Specific Language Impairment (SLI). This dilemma has motivated a new field of research, the study of bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment (BISLI), which aims at disentangling the effects of bilingualism from those of SLI, making use of both models of bilingualism and models of language impairment. The majority of the studies are currently focused on morphosyntax as a key direction of research. The present issue, which originated in papers presented at a scientific workshop funded by the Israel Science Foundation and The Hebrew University's Center for Advanced Study, held in February 2009, aims at broadening this area of research to other linguistic domains.