This week's weekly research presentation at the Children's Voices Centre
Children's Voices Centre community research lunch
Supporting young German children’s speech and language development
Wiebke Freese
University of Lübeck, Germany
Communication is the key to the world, and children are our future. However, some children need support in their communication development, for example because their speech and language is not developing as it should. This has an impact on children’s futures. This is where speech pathologists can help. They identify the exact causes and support the children with specific interventions. This requires knowledge of speech and language acquisition and specific tools that facilitate identification and differential diagnosis in order to support the right children with the right strategies.
Most of the knowledge about children’s speech and language development is available for English. Since development varies between languages, specific knowledge is also needed for languages other than English. This is where my project comes in: it aims to help gather data on German-speaking children in order to better support them in their development. In this presentation, I will outline the research we conducted with 445 children with and without speech sound disorders, aged two to six years. Using a longitudinal design, we assessed them in different ways (e.g., consistency, non-word repetition, stimulability) to better understand their development and to find tools to identify needs early.
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| 20 CVC staff and affiliates attended from across Australia |
