Symposium Language Impairment and Bilingualism

Symposium Language Impairment and Bilingualism

  16/11/2017

On the occasion of Tessel Boerma’s defence, Utrecht University hosted a symposium on language impairment and bilingualism on the 27th of October. During this informative event, three speakers shared their research on these topics.

Pascale Engel de Abreu talked about her research on improving the learning of children speaking a minority language. Within her project, she researched intervention methods for Portugese-speaking children in Luxembourgh, and developed a preschool language intervention in order to improve oral language and literacy. She also shared the evaluation in the form of preliminary results of the intervention so far.

The second speaker was Jan de Jong, who talked about the linguistic LITMUS test: Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings. Jan spoke of the way these tests can be used not only for linguistic reseach, but they can also be helpful when diagnosing multilingual children.

Finally, Mirjam Blumental from Kentalis spoke on the development of their Speakaboo app. In this app, parents can monitor their child language development, which can later be analysed by speech language therapists in order to assess children in a langauge that the professional does not speak.

For more information on these talks, take a look at the event page: https://www.uu.nl/en/events/symposium-language-impairment-and-bilingualism . You can find the abstracts on the left side of the page!