Response to Commentaries on the interface between bilingual development and specific language impairment

In their Commentaries, Vainikka and Young-Scholten, Chiat, H°akansson, and Peets and Bialystok discuss alternative theoretical frameworks for understanding the underlying linguistic configurations and language development in SLI, L2, or both. The contribution of Peets and Bialystok is highlighted here because they offer a framework from cognitive psychology that could be useful for bridging the divide between representational and domain-specific deficit theories and processing and domain-general deficit theories of SLI.