Language combinations, subtypes, and severity in the study of bilingual children with specific language impairment

Perhaps the most striking point discussed by Paradis is the finding that the difference between bilingual children with SLI and typically developing (TD) bilingual children (favoring the latter) is no greater than the difference between monolingual children with SLI and their TD monolingual counterparts. As Paradis notes, such a finding has implications for processing capacity accounts of SLI because it suggests that there are no deleterious cumulative effects when a child with SLI must learn two languages rather than one language. This type of finding obviously has great importance for clinical practice as well. For these reasons, I provide here some research questions that should be posed to examine this issue further.