The effect of verbal short term memory on receptive language abilities in bilingual and monolingual children with Specific Language Impairment receptive

Abstract

The present study investigates whether the bilingual advantage in verbal STM holds for bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and if so whether it affects lexical and syntactic abilities. Sixteen monolingual and 16 bilingual children with SLI, with Greek as L1 and Albanian or Russian as L2 were compared with two control groups of 20 monolingual and 18 bilingual (L1: Greek, L2: Albanian or Russian) TD children in vocabulary, verbal STM and syntactic comprehension. Both clinical groups were worse than mono-TD group. Bi-SLI children were worse than mono-SLI children in vocabulary, in one verbal STM task and in one syntactic comprehension task. The results indicate parallel patterns of deficits in bi-and mono-children with SLI in the domains of STM and syntax.