Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society (COST IS0804)

The aim of the project is to profile bilingual specific language impairment (biSLI) by establishing a network that will coordinate research on the linguistic and cognitive abilities of bilingual children with SLI across different migrant communities. The project will disentangle bilingualism and SLI by establishing the relative contribution of each and show how SLI can be identified in both

At present, medical, language, and educational professionals have only limited diagnostic instruments to distinguish bilingual migrant children with language impairments from those who will eventually catch up with their monolingual peers. The main objective of the project is to find means to profile specific language impairment in bilingual children (biSLI) by establishing a network that will coordinate research on the linguistic and cognitive abilities of bilingual children with SLI across different migrant communities.

Researchers and research groups from 27 countries participate in the project.The aim is to disentangle bilingualism and SLI by establishing the relative contribution of each, to show how SLI can be identified in both of a child's languages, to explore the extent to which the manifestations of SLI are similar or different across languages in the same child, and to establish whether the nature and severity of SLI is affected by the child's acquisition of more than one language