AbstractsPsychology

The present thesis has investigated how French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children with SLI (specific language impairment) performed on various tasks examining language and executive functioning (EF) abilities, in comparison to monolingual and bilingual peers without SLI. Language was investigated in the domains of phonology (novel-word repetition task), vocabulary (picture-pointing and picture-naming tasks) and grammar (elicitation tasks of past tense and object clitics). EF was investigated in the non-verbal domains of response inhibition (stop-signal task), planning (Stocking of Cambridge task), working memory (WM) (spatial WM task), interference inhibition and shifting (local-global task) and in the verbal domain of WM (forward and backward digit span). This is one of the few studies that assesses both diverse language and EF domains within the same population of MOTD, BITD, MOSLI and BISLI children. The main goal of this study was to assess the respective effect of bilingualism and SLI on language and EF, as well as the combined effect of bilingualism and SLI within the same child. More specifically, this study aimed at disentangling the effect of bilingualism and the effect of SLI on language and EF. From a clinical perspective, we hoped to find what is characteristic of SLI as opposed to bilingualism. This could provide insight as to how we should diagnose SLI in bilinguals. From a theoretical perspective, this study aimed at shedding light on the underlying mechanisms driving language acquisition in the context of bilingualism compared to the context of SLI.