Introduction

The detailed study of specific language impairment (SLI) in English-speaking children has a history that goes back to the mid 1960s, but it was only in the last decade of the twentieth century that research into impairment in languages other than English began to flourish. The major part of that effort was devoted to other European languages. Initially work concentrated on Italian and German, but more recently Dutch, French, Swedish, and Spanish have come under scrutiny. There has also been some investigation of Hebrew, Greek, and Japanese. Work on child language impairment in Chinese languages has been limited by comparison. Here we will review some recent work on Cantonese, to provide a Chinese perspective on the crosslinguistic enterprise in language impairment. This is set in the context of the major preoccupations of current research into SLI. Prime among these, from a psycholinguistic viewpoint, is the disagreement between nativist and emergentist views of the reasons for the selective grammatical impairments observed in SLI (Schanker, 2002). But researchers have also begun to explore the genetic basis of SLI, and the neural mechanisms that might underlie it.

The term “specific” in SLI arose from the lack of any identifiable etiology for the condition at the time it was first identified. It became clear, in a series of studies three decades ago, that for a minority of English-speaking children, the task of learning to speak and understand their native language was effortful and protracted.