The ‘Language acquisition, processing and disorders’ research group is part of the four communities of the University’s strategic theme Dynamics of Youth. Members of the group study the following and related topics:

1) First language acquisition by investigating the role of a broad range of factors and mechanisms in various aspects of children’s language development (e.g., vocabulary, syntax, pragmatics, prosody) spanning from the last trimester of pregnancy to late childhood across languages. These factors include but are not limited to

• Biologically motivated innate mechanisms such as the Biological Codes
• The interplay between children’s language development and development in social cognition and identity
• Learning mechanisms such as statistical learning, associative learning
• Frequency, salience and iconicity of form-meaning mappings in the input
• Input in the visual modality such as co-speech gestures
• Presence of language disorders
• Musicality

2) Multilingualism by investigating and comparing different types of multilingual development across a range of settings:

• Simultaneous bilingualism
• (Early) second language acquisition in naturalistic settings
• Interaction between early bilingualism and foreign language learning in school settings (L3 acquisition)
• Multilingualism in the context of language disorders

3) Language and speech production and processing, by comparing further sets of speakers:

• healthy speakers – speakers with language-related neurocognitive deficiencies (e.g., autism)
• speakers with innate disorders (DLD, dyslexia)– speakers with acquired deficiencies (aphasia)
• monolinguals – multilinguals

An overarching goal is to shed light on the set of general issues having to do with how language structure interacts with language acquisition and language processing, and how these interactions are embedded within and determined by domain-general cognitive processes and social mechanisms.

Research Questions

Examples of research questions we address are:

• How can we validly and reliably measure individual differences in language development and the cognitive and social processes underlying it?
• Do infants capitalise on biological innate mechanisms in perception of prosodic boundaries in speech and in the use of pitch in the earliest stage of caregiver-infant interaction?
• How do availability of visual cues and visual attention to these cues influence the learning of prosodic phrasing and prosodic form-meaning mappings?
• How do diverse populations (e.g. animals, preverbal infants, minimal-verbal children with neurological conditions) utilise prosodic parameters to communicate?
• How do languages interact in the multilingual mind, and are these processes different for individuals with language disorders?
• (Why) do multilingual children have advantages over their monolingual peers in novel language learning?
• Does bilingualism have any general effects on tone perception (in infants), which cannot be reduced to specific differences in tonal input states?
• From item-based patterns to generalized structures/rules: what drives the transition?
• Do children with DLD and dyslexia have statistical learning deficits?
• How do children use information in speech (e.g., accent) to make social judgments and inferences about others and construct identity?
• How do typological differences in prosody and other aspects of the grammar influence the learning of prosodic marking of information structure?
• To what extent do speakers align their prosodic production to their conversational partners and how is this ability affected in children with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism?
• How is language development in refugee children related to traumatic experiences and socio-emotional well-being?
• What are the effects of first language support to multilingual pupils?

Techniques

For investigating language acquisition and processing in infants, children and adults, we use a range of experimental techniques, including the prenatal training paradigm, Headturn Preference Procedure (HPP), audiovisual habituation (e.g. switch procedure), eye tracking (visual world paradigm, reading), Event Related Potentials (ERP), EMA, EMG, Artificial Language Learning (ALL), time-frequency analysis, neural entrainment, Truth Value Judgment tasks, foreign language learning tasks, etc. We also use computational modelling and conduct various analyses on production data (e.g. adult-directed speech vs. infant-directed speech).

Projects with high societal impact

We maintain thriving collaborations with professionals (speech and language therapists, remedial teachers, doctors, policy makers) and contribute to innovations of diagnostics and intervention for adults and children with language and speech difficulties, mostly in collaborative work with colleagues at the HU University of Applied Sciences, UMC Utrecht (and WKZ in particular), the Royal Auris Group and Stichting Viertaal.

Some examples of research output for societal target groups include the following:

Diagnostic tools

• Litmus-NL: online test battery for diagnosing developmental language disorder (DLD) in multilingual children

• Colouring Book App: a new method for assessing language comprehension in (newcomer) children

Interventions

• Bouke Bouwt een Waanzinnige Wereld: serious game for enhancing grammar skills of children with DLD
• CodeTaal: the first method for teaching English to children with DLD, both in the Netherlands and worldwide

Tools for professionals

–EDINA-toolset: tools for teachers and schools working with newcomers

– Information folder for speech and language therapists working with patients with the 22q11 deletion syndrome