Instructive bilingualism: Can bilingual children with specific language impairment rely on one language in learning a second one?

Only a decade ago, a very few researchers considered the study of language disorders in bilingual population worth pursuing. It was mostly argued that there were enough challenges in studying bilingualism, and even more challenges in the study of specific language impairment (SLI). So why complicate things and combine the two domains? The large waves of migration in recent years led to a growth in the number of children being raised in multilingual societies, and elucidated the importance of studying language disorders in bilingual children. In Israel, for example, these demographic changes yield an extremely diverse population. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) and the Ministry of Education, 20% of school children who attended Hebrew-speaking secular schools in 2004 came from families in which at least one parent did not speak Hebrew (CBS, 2006).