New book: Assessing Multilingual Children

Second language learners often produce language forms resembling those of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). At present, professionals working in language assessment and education have only limited diagnostic instruments to distinguish language impaired migrant children from those who will eventually catch up with their monolingual peers. A new book titled Assessing Multilingual Children: Disentangling Bilingualism from Language Impairment, edited by Prof. Sharon Armon-Lotem, Prof. Jan de Jong from the University of Amsterdam, and our graduate student Natalia Meir, presents a comprehensive set of tools for assessing the linguistic abilities of bilingual children. It aims to disentangle effects of bilingualism from those of SLI, making use of both models of bilingualism and models of language impairment.

The book is a result of four years of work within a wide European network funded by COST and chaired by Prof. Sharon Armon-Lotem.