The identification of bilingual children with specific French language impairment

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 (nonword 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 38 TD children. NWR and SR significantly distinguished between the Mo-TD and the Mo-SLI children and between the Bi-TD and the Bi-SLI children. Moreover, there was minimal impact of different factors related to bilingual development on children's performance.