Background Bilingual children and children diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD) are characterized by reduced lexical‐retrieval abilities. Few studies examined their joint contribution and the mechanisms underlying these effects in the lexical domain. Aims To explore the joint effects of bilingualism and DLD by adopting a four‐group comparison in which the difference between bi‐ and monolingual children with DLD is directly compared with that of bi‐ and monolingual children with typical language development (TLD). In addition, to examine the mechanisms underlying the effects of bilingualism and DLD on children's lexical‐retrieval abilities, we tested how item's characteristics (frequency of use) modulate the effects of bilingualism and DLD. Methods & Procedures Fifty‐eight children (aged 9–14 years) participated in the current study. They were either Hebrew monolingual or Hebrew–English bilinguals and were either diagnosed with DLD or had TLD. Children completed a Hebrew picture‐naming task and verbal short‐term memory tests. The influence of participants’ characteristics, including bilingualism, DLD and verbal short‐term memory, as well as item's characteristics (frequency of use) were tested. Outcomes & Results Accuracy analysis revealed that bilingual children scored lower than monolingual children and that children with DLD scored lower than children with TLD. Critically, the two factors interacted such that their joint presence resulted in less‐than‐additive effects. Specifically, although bilingual children with DLD performed worse than all other groups, they performed better than expected under an additive model. Interestingly, monolingual children with DLD performed similarly to bilingual children with TLD. Increased verbal short‐term memory was associated with better performance across the four groups. Finally, bilingualism and DLD interacted with item frequency, such that being bilingual, having DLD, or both, resulted in increased sensitivity to item frequency manifested in exceptionally lower performance on low‐frequency items. Conclusions & Implications The findings suggest that the strength of linguistic representations contribute to the effects of bilingualism and DLD. Further, the presence of bilingualism in the context of DLD does not exaggerate the impact of DLD. Clinically, this suggests that differences between bi‐ and monolingual children with DLD must be considered in reference to the gap in lexical‐retrieval performance observed between bi‐ and monolingual children with TLD. Finally, because monolingual children with DLD and bilingual children with TLD performed similarly, sensitive diagnostic tools and intervention programmes should be adopted to allow correct identification and treatment of bilingual children with DLD.

The lexical retrieval ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical language development was compared. Fifty Hebrew-speaking children participated: 15 school-age with SLI, 20 typically developing, matched on age to the SLI group and 15 younger, typically developing matched on naming performance to the SLI group. Participants were tested in a sentence completion task with semantic cuing and with morphological cuing. SLI children performed poorer than the chronological-age group and similarly to the naming-matched group. Error patterns showed a qualitative difference between the SLI and naming-matched groups. The results suggest that lexical retrieval of children with SLI is delayed and qualitatively different from that of typically developing children.

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