Recommendations for multilingualism and developmental communicative disorders

This report investigates two topics that are gaining growing interest in bilingual research, concerning on the one side the identification of language and reading disorders in bilingual children and, on the other side, the interaction between bilingualism and these disorders in children who have been officially diagnosed as communicatively impaired. Our research suggests that bilingualism, far from being a disadvantage, can offer linguistic and cognitive benefits that extend also to impaired children. We build on these results to indicate some best practices and recommendations for parents, educators and health professionals that deal with children suffering from specific communicative impairments.