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Research interests

• Interaction between language and cognition
• Child language acquisition and language disorder
• Multilingualism
• Executive functioning

Current research

PhD project

SLI and executive functioning in the context of multilingualism.

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a developmental disorder in which children exhibit severe difficulties with the acquisition of language, while all otherdomains seem to develop normally. In the past ten years, there has been a growing interest for research on SLI in successive bilingual children. (i.e. children learning a second language - L2 – around age 3 when entering school). One main goal in this new fieldof research is to disentangle the effects of having SLI and being bilingual in the same child. This type of research has great clinical implications by providing better assessment and remediation tools for bilingual children with SLI.

To date, research on child L2 vs. SLI has mainly focused on language production, showing that the language produced by L2 children resemble the language produced by SLI children. This overlap between L2 and SLI features makes the identification of SLI in L2 children problematic on the sole basis of their language production.

My research project aims at identifying potential differences between SLI and L2 children outside language production. This issue is addressed by examining French-speaking monolingual children with and without SLI in comparison with bilingual children with and without SLI learning French as their second language. First, on-line comprehension tasks, measuring the ability to process (un)grammatical information in real-time, will be used to determine how SLI, L2 and L2-SLI children might differ in their accuracy and speed of processing. Second, non-linguistic performances, tapping executive functioning (EF) abilities, will be investigated as recent studies suggest that SLI children are impaired in EF while bilinguals show enhanced abilities in this domain. Tasks measuring various executive functions will be used to determine to what extent EF might contribute to the diagnosis of SLI in bilingual children.

Previous project

MA thesis (Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2007)

Role oflanguage-specific anduniversal factors in the semantic and syntactic encoding of motion events by French- and English-speaking children.

Different languages vary in the encoding of spatial relations. These cross-linguistic differences raise questions for language developmentin terms of how children learn to handle these language-specific constraints. This studyexamined the ability of English and French children aged 6 and 10 to express motion events with salient Manner and Path components in comparison with their adult peers. The ability to encode both Manner and Path components increased with age in both languages, yet at a slower rate for French-speaking children than for their English-speaking peers. Similarly, the ability to express both Manner and Path within a compact syntactic structure increased with age in both groups, yet again at a slower rate in French than in English. French speakers typically distributed Manner and Path across main and subordinate clauses, while English speakers typically packaged both Manner and Path within one clause. Children from age 6 dominantly preferred the syntactic pattern of adult speakers of their own languages, pointing to language-specific influences. However, a large proportion of French-speaking children used syntactic patterns that were rather atypical of their language and similar to patterns used by their English peers, suggesting universal influences.

ACLC - Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication

Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam (CSCA)

Homepage Anne Baker

Homepage Jan de Jong

COST Action IS0804: Language impairment in a Multilingual Society