Clinical Epidemiology and Statistics in Child Language Acquisition
Key person: Werner Vach
Collaborators: Center for Child Language, University of Southern Denmark
It is today more and more recognized that acquisition of adequate language competences at the preschool age is a prerequisite for later success at school and for a satisfactory academic and social development in children. Reaching such adequate language levels is today no longer a trivial task for many children. Hence many countries have started to screen children systematically for delays in their language acquisition and to develop intervention programs at the individual and population level to improve children's environment and conditions for language acquisition.
We contribute to the development of screening and intervention programs and their validation. However, as the basic knowledge on child language acquisition is still limited we also develop and apply statistical methods to be used in basic research contributing to a better understanding of language acquisition in general and to the identification of possible targets for screening and intervention programs in particular. The focus is on methods allowing a deeper understanding of individual variability in language acquisition and on more efficient analyses of experimental studies.