Introduction

According to a recent government review in England carried out by John Bercow (DCSF 2008b) around 7 per cent of children entering primary school are thought to have speech, language and communication needs (SLC needs: also referred to here with the covering term communication impairment). This figure includes children who have SLC difficulties that are secondary to diagnosed conditions such as hearing impairment, autistic spectrum disorder or neurological impairments, and also the significant number of children who have primary communication impairments for which there is no immediate or obvious cause. There is some evidence to suggest that children living in conditions of social deprivation are particularly vulnerable to delays in language impairment (see, e.g., Locke et al. 2002; Clegg and Ginsborg 2006), but communication impairment is by no means restricted to this group. A fundamental assumption when considering communication impairment is that vulnerability is not affected by the child's first language or languages. This means it is not the case that English-speaking children are more or less vulnerable than, say, Japanese-speaking children. So we would expect similar proportions of children to experience SLC needs in communities where English is not spoken as a first language, or where the community is bi- or multilingual. Features of the child's environment will have an influence, but not the specific language(s) spoken.