Notes on the nature of bilingual specific language impairment

Johanne Paradis’ Keynote Article can be read as a concise critical review of the research that focuses on the sometimes strained relationship between bilingualism and specific language impairment (SLI). In my comments I will add some thoughts based on our own research on the learning of Dutch as a second language (L2) by children with SLI.1 Our research focuses on successive bilingualism, and our group of bilingual subjects consists of children who have Turkish as their first language (L1) and Dutch as their L2. Turkish is a minority language in the full sense of Paradis’ description: although the number of speakers of Turkish as an L1 is large in The Netherlands, there is no teaching of Turkish in primary schools. This situation could be said to lead to “subtractive bilingualism,” and the possibility of a “cumulative effect” of bilingualism and SLI that Paradis discusses is well worth considering for this particular group of subjects. In our study we were not able to include monolingual children with SLI whose native language is Turkish; the issue was therefore addressed with respect to the children’s output in Dutch.