NWR and SR tasks informed by linguistic theory are appropriate for use as part of the diagnostic process for identifying language impairment in bilingual children for whom the language of assessment is different from the home language, in diverse sociolinguistic contexts.

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We report on the usefulness of three LITMUS tools in distinguishing bilingual children with SLI (Bi-SLI) from bilingual children with typical development (Bi-TD), in France: LITMUS-NWR-FR (non-word repetition), LITMUS-SR-FR (sentence repetition), and LITMUS-PABIQ (parental questionnaire). 82 bilingual children, aged 5–8, who had all been exposed to both French and either Arabic, Portuguese or Turkish, recruited both in ordinary schools and in SLP practices, were divided into Bi-TD (n = 61) and Bi-SLI (n = 21) groups based on parental questionnaire (LITMUS-PABIQ) information and standardized language scores in each language. Monolingual controls included 17 children with SLI and 37 TD children. NWR and SR significantly distinguished between the Bi-TD and the Bi-SLI children, and there was minimal impact of different factors related to bilingual development on children’s performance.