When can specific language impairment be diagnosed in sequential bilinguals? How long should they be exposed to the second language?
(Please also see the answer to question 8.) It can take 3-5 years in school for children to have oral language proficiency in their second language on a par with their monolingual peers, and it can take 5-7 years for them to have academic language skills, including reading and writing, on a par with their monolingual peers. Because it takes such a long time for these children to have full proficiency in the second language, this raises issues for early and effective identification of children with specific language impairment. If clinicians wait until second language children have had adequate exposure, they will under-identify children with specific language impairment at the ages when they are in need of therapy. After all, the earlier the identification, the earlier therapy can be given. The opposite problem is “over-identification”, where too many normal second language children are mistaken as having specific language impairment because of their incomplete second language abilitie
