On the nature and cause of Specific Language Impairment

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a developmental disorder affecting the development of language despite normal levels of hearing, non-verbal intelligence and no evidence of frank neurological impairment of psychological disturbance. Research on language development of children with SLI is motivated by two reasons. From a clinical perspective, research on SLI is necessary to establish how this disorder manifests itself, and to provide evidence for the nature and cause of the impairment. This has implications for differential diagnosis and treatment. From a theoretical perspective, the existence of a disorder affecting language but not other cognitive domains has been argued to provide empirical evidence for modularity.

The first part of this course will provide a background on SLI, and a discussion of current accounts on the nature and cause of SLI. The second part will introduce and discuss recent off-line and on-line studies in children with SLI and their implications for SLI theories. Finally, we will compare the profile of children with SLI to the profile of sequential bilingual children and discuss the implications of the similarities/differences between the two groups for SLI theories.