The identification of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in children growing up in bilingual contexts poses a major challenge for researchers, and has clear clinical and educational repercussions: How do we know if a child's language difficulties are due to SLI or due to insufficient exposure to the language being assessed? Bi-SLI 2015 aims to bring together all researchers who wish to share results of studies on language development in children acquiring language in contexts of bilingualism associated with SLI (Bi-SLI) and on how these can be distinguished from contexts of bilingualism associated with typical development (Bi-TD). European COST Action IS0804 "Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistics Patterns and the Road to Assessment" (http://www.bi-sli.org/) developed a series of tools, dubbed LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings), designed to disentangle Bi-SLI from Bi-TD by tapping specific linguistic and executive function skills. Part of the conference will be specifically devoted to results on LITMUS tasks. In addition to oral presentations, Bi-SLI 2015 will include a poster session.

Important dates:

Abstract EXTENDED DEADLINE: February 15th, 2015

Notification of acceptance: March 23th, 2015

Location: François Rabelais University, Tours, France

Dates: July 2-3, 2015

Organizing Committee: Lætitia de Almeida, Sandrine Ferré, Éléonore Morin, Philippe Prévost, Christophe dos Santos, Laurie Tuller, and Rasha Zebib