Child Language Disorders lab
The CLaDis lab is a research team studying language disorders in children. We are part of the Neurolinguistics research group at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.
Disorders in language may occur with or without a clear neurological explanation. Either way, they critically affect education and employment later in life. To best help children with language disorder, we focus on both language ability and its neurological basis. See more below!
Language matters
What aspects of language knowledge are difficult for children with language disorders? We focus on verb and sentence production and comprehension since these are known to be challenging for children with language disorders.
Do children with language disorders learn new words using atypical mechanisms? We focus on learning of verbs and understanding which linguistic contexts make this easier or more difficult.
How can we best identify language difficulties? We are developing a set of language tests for diagnosing and characterizing language impairments in children.
Brain matters
Which differences in brain structure do children with language disorder show? Our current work focuses on white and grey matter deviations in children with developmental language disorders (DLD) and survivors of brain tumours.
Which of those differences in brain structure (partly) explain their language difficulties? This is where our language matters intersect with our brain matters!
As children get older, which changes in their brain are associated with better outcomes in their language?
Team work makes the dream work
Because language does not "happen" in isolation, our research is at the intersection of several disciplines. We combine knowledge from clinical linguistics, speech and language pathology, cognitive neuropsychology, neurology, oncology, and neuroscience to address our research agenda. This means we work closely with collaborators who are experts on each of these different fields.