Overview

Bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment (Developmental Language Disorder)

Bi-SLI 2018 is the 2nd conference within the Bi-SLI conference series and aims to bring together researchers who wish to share results of studies on language development in bilingual children with SLI/DLD (Bi-SLI/DLD) compared to bilingual children with typical development (Bi-TD).

Several waves of migration within the past decades have led to an increase in the number of children worldwide who start pre-school in a language that is not the language spoken in the home. While speech and language therapists can successfully identify language impairment in monolingual children, this is far from obvious when the language they evaluate is the child’s second language. Numerous studies have documented that bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment/Developmental Language Disorder (SLI/DLD) are over- or under-represented in speech-language therapy caseloads.

To address the issues of over- and underrepresentation of bilingual children with SLI/DLD (Bi-SLI/DLD) in speech-language therapy caseloads, the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action IS0804 ‘Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment’ developed the LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) tools series that were designed to facilitate the identification of SLI/DLD in bilingual children. It also started the Bi-SLI conference series with Bi-SLI 2015 at the University of Tours.

The keynote speakers in Bi-SLI 2018 are:

Prof Ianthi Tsimpli (University of Cambridge)
Prof Lisa Bedore (Temple University, Philadelphia)

To download the abstracts booklet for Bi-SLI 2018, click here.

Bi-SLI 2018 is immediately after the Child Language Symposium 2018 (25-26 June 2018) which will also be at the University of Reading.

Bi-SLI 2018 will be followed by a knowledge transfer workshop for speech & language therapists and other professionals who support multilingual children. The knowledge transfer workshop will be on the 29th June.

The Conference will be organised by the Centre for Literacy & Multilingualism at the University of Reading.

Organising committee: Theo Marinis, Ludovica Serratrice, Emma Pagnamenta, George Pontikas