Language Development in Bilingual Spanish-Catalan Children with and Without Specific Language Impairment: A Longitudinal Perspective

Abstract

The present chapter explores both the cognitive and linguistic development of bilingual children with and without Specific Language Impairment (SLI), and focuses on Spanish and Catalan languages. We first describe some similarities between Monolingual and Bilingual language acquisition and how Bilingual children reach most of the milestones at the same age as monolinguals, despite having less exposure to each language separately. We refer to different characteristics of simultaneous bilingual language acquisition and discuss some variables that influence this process, such as the linguistic and non-linguistic characteristics that influence bilingual language acquisition and proficiency. One such variable is the status of each language in the social context. We highlight the advantages and disadvantages of being bilingual when compared with monolinguals in cognitive tasks related to information access and storage in long-term memory. We present several studies describing the development of monolingual children with SLI to establish a basis for comparing bilingual children with SLI. We mention some studies which have explored cognitive abilities in bilingual children with SLI; some studies finding compensating abilities and some others finding a “bilingual disadvantage”. We show several studies with different outcomes depending on the type of bilingualism, such as the differences between sequential bilinguals as compared to simultaneous bilingual children. Finally, we present a series of studies that have investigated phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical-semantic and pragmatic characteristics of bilingual Spanish-Catalan development in children with and without SLI. Executive functions related to both cognitive and language processing in bilingual Spanish-Catalan acquisition are also shown. The chapter ends with some research which have analyzed reading abilities and social interaction in this population.