Language Acquisition

The research at my lab focuses on language acquisition by bilingual children who have been diagnosed for Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and combines my work on monolingual and bilingual typical acquisition with my interest in children with Specific Language Impairment. My research focuses on the one hand on the linguistic and cognitive phenomena which characterize language impairment and bilingualism in children, and on the other hand on the gap between the linguistic abilities of children and those of adults, all this against the background assumption that there is an innate language capacity which children make use of in the acquisition of language.

My research interests met in three ISF funded research projects on “Disentangling Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and socioeconomic influences on language acquisition and emergent literacy among preschool children with and without SLI from two bilingual disadvantaged populations” (2014-2018), “Specific Language Impairment in Bilingual Children - A longitudinal study” (2010-2014), and “Morphological, Syntactic, and Pragmatic Representation and Processing in Bilingual Children with Specific Language Impairments” (2005-2009) which aimed at targeting the relative contribution of the linguistic impairment and the bilingual situation to the unique linguistic profile of these children.

This already led to identifying indicators of SLI in English-Hebrew bilingual children and have been expanded to bilingual Russian-Hebrew children in a BMBF funded project on “Language Acquisition as a Window to Social Integration among Russian Language Minority Children in Germany and Israel”, which adds a sociolinguistic aspect to the issue, and a GIF  study of “How can a teacher tell if a bilingual child has language impairment: A study of the language of Russian-Hebrew and Russian-German migrant children in preschool and school years?”. My research is carried in coordination with COST Action IS0804 “Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment” which offers a cross European research network.