BILINGUALISM AND LANGUAGE TROUBLES IN THE CHILD : A RETROSPECTIVE STUDY

While bilingualism is usually viewed as an asset, what is its influence on children with difficulties ? In order to answer this question, we show the results of a retrospective study on forty-seven 3 to 6 years old children with language disorders that where evaluated in our outpatient clinic over a period of two years. Our aim was to compare the clinical diagnosis associated to the language disorder in the monolingual and multilingual groups. We show that 35 % of the children seen in our clinic for severe language disorders are raised in a multilingual environment. In this group, the main diagnosis is a pervasive developmental disorder (31,25 %), whereas specific language disorder is as frequent in the multilingual as in the monolingual group (12,5 %). We think that multilingualism, might be associated with a situation of vulnerability predisposing to early developmental disorders including language deficiencies, rather than being a factor of vulnerability to specific language disorders.