News

Bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment (Bi-SLI) 2018 Conference

Dates

from June 27, 2018 to June 28, 2018

Location
University of Reading
Whiteknights Campus
Reading RG6 6AH
UK

The linguists of our unit will present their latest work at this conference.

Overview

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.

Our colleagues, Prof. Laurice Tuller, Prof. Philippe Prévost, Dr. Christophe Dos Santos, Dr. Sandrine Ferré et Dr. Racha Zebib will present their research project on the identifying language impairment in bilingual children in France and in Germany.

More information Programme

Contact :
Prof. Laurice Tuller :