Specific Language Impairment (SLI) across languages: Properties and possible loci

This Special Issue, dedicated to Celia Jakubowicz, brings together work on impaired language acquisition with a focus on Specific Language Impairment (SLI). The languages under investigation include Mainstream American English, African American English, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Greek, and Hebrew. The majority of studies are devoted to the area of wh-questions, while some studies explore other syntactic domains, including clitics and complementizers. All contributions address the question of how the specific difficulties observed in children and adolescents with SLI can be accounted for in a generative linguistic framework, and propose various accounts and suggestions as to the nature and locus of SLI. New evidence for the properties, types, and possible loci of SLI is presented, demonstrating the intimate relationships that exist between linguistic theory and psycholinguistic research on SLI.