Language Disorders in Bilingual Children and Adults

This book provides speech-language pathologists, advanced students in communication disorders programs, and clinical language researchers with information needed to formulate and respond to questions related to effective service delivery to bilingual children and adults with suspected or confirmed language disorders. The bilinguals of interest represent varying levels of first- and second-language proficiency across the life span. That is, bilingualism is not determined here by a priori notions of relative proficiency in each language, but rather by the individual's experience or need for two languages, inclusive in this functional definition of bilingualism are typical children and adults who rely on two different languages, to varying degrees, to meet their communicative needs. Similarly, the 4-year-old language-delayed child from a Spanish-speaking family who has just begun attending an English preschool program is considered bilingual, as is the 72-year-old retired professor with global aphasia who spoke both Vietnamese and English prior to the acquired language Impairment. In each case, the relative level of skill or proficiency in each language is an important diagnostic factor, but it does not determine who is or who is not bilingual for the purposes of this text. Book jacket.

Kathryn Kohnert, Ph.D., M.A., CCC, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at the University of Minnesota