Interesting. I see some of the same issues with DS6, diagnosed with an expressive language disorder last year, raised bilingual French (home) and English (community) and enrolled in a Spanish immersion program since K.

I can go in more details on his history through PM if you are interested, but what I learned is:

1) most ST who are not familiar with multilingual kids try to simplify the problem by asking families to go monolingual. The test instruments are not normed with bilingual kids, monolingual STs can't assess functioning across multiple language, it makes problem much too complicated for lost people. And there is very little litterature on the subject (although the little there is shows benefits to keeping the second language going it is usually in a context where the secondary language is the home language and the primary/target language is the community language).

2) the one ST we have talked with who deals with lots of multilingual kids told me that language disorders are problem with language acquisition mechanisms and not specific to a given language. So the same problem will show across all languages -- you were right about that.

3) there seems (no hard data there I could find) that learning multiple languages could help with some meta-cognition skills that could in turn help with the language issues.

4) kids learn how to compensate. The brighter, the better. There might be a cost (they can spend a lot of energy compensating).

I think it is great that you identified visual support as a potential helping mechanism.

Last edited by SiaSL; 09/09/12 12:13 AM. Reason: Hate. The. Keyboard. On. The. Phone.