Elma Blom

Bilingualism and Language Impairment: theoretical and clinical issues

Utrecht University, Department of Special Education: Cognitive and Motor Disabilities

About 7% of the children have severe difficulties learning language. What happens if these children are faced with a situation in which they learn more than one language? In this talk, I will present some recent outcomes from our research on bilingualism and language impairment. Using a four-group design with monolingual and bilingual children with and without language impairment, I will discuss, first, the separate and combined effects of bilingualism and language impairment on vocabulary, morphology and verbal memory. In the second part of the presentation, new instruments will be discussed that could help us to correctly identify bilingual children with language impairment.