Language diagnostics in bilingual children  

More than half of the Flemish speech therapists assess the language skills of bilingual children identically as those of monolingual children. This entails a risk on misdiagnoses. This research project aims to develop a protocol for assessing language skills in bilingual children. The protocol will offer research-based guidelines on how speech therapists should assess language skills in this client group. 

Want to know more? 
Contact charlotte.mostaert@thomasmore.be

This project runs in collaboration with the team of Speech Therapy and Audiology at KULeuven. 

Parent questionnaire about native language development (ALDeQ-NL)

Tools to assess the native language of bilingual children are currently lacking in the speech therapy practice. This research project is developing the ALDeQ-NL, a Dutch version of the ALDeQ (Paradis, Emmerzael, & Sorenson Duncan, 2010). The ALDeQ-NL is a parent questionnaire to assess the native language development of the child. The original ALDeQ discriminates between bilingual children with and without language development disorder. The researchers investigate whether the QLDeQ-NL also discriminates between these groups of children. 

Want to know more? 
Contact heleen.leysen@thomasmore.be

This project runs in collaboration with the team of Speech Therapy and Audiology at KULeuven and Vives. 

Readers at risk

More knowledge and a better attitude towards readers at risk are necessary to identify spelling and reading difficulties in a timely manner and to anticipate to more significant problems. This research project investigates the knowledge and the attitude of the Flemish and Dutch teachers / speech therapists about providing “pre-teaching” and/or remediating to the reader at risk. It also aims to design a sensitizing kit and to evaluate its implementation. The research project also investigates what the needs and the effective principles are in resources for readers at risk and how they can be implemented in didactic resources for readers at risk. 

Want to know more? 
Contact marjolein.noe@thomasmore.be

Nonword-Repetition-Task (NRT) for bilingual children 

A NRT task consists of non-existing words that a client repeats. By using such tasks, the researcher wants to investigate how language information is processed in the short-term memory. The diagnostic mere value is determined by (sub)lexical factors. In this research project, a NRT instrument is being developed that takes into account those factors and can be used in monolingual and bilingual school-aged children.