The main objective of the Action is to discover methods that can be used for diagnosing
language problems in children in all European languages. The specific focus are children at
the age of school-entry (age 5 to 6) though, if time permits, the Action will also consider
younger children. While it is desirable to reach a diagnosis as early as possible in a child’s
life, the younger the child the harder it is to diagnose language problems. At the age of
school-entry, an assessment of language problems has great practical importance .
The main objective is structured into two milestones that are accomplished after two and
after four years respectively. After two years, a report is released that provides an overview
of test methods and experimental procedures that will be used in the coordinated research on
children around the age of school-entry . After four years, a second report is published that
contains a set of studies on cross-linguistic acquisition with comparable methods. Based on
this second publication, recommendations can be made concerning linguistic properties along
with suitable test methods that can be used to develop cross-linguistic tests for language
problems and language impairment in children at the age of school-entry.
The likely end users of the results of this Action are professionals in the medical, speech
pathology, and education communities that work with children who might need language
therapy. To shape the result of the basic research conducted in this Action into a set of test
materials that professionals in the medical, speech pathology and education communities can
use, the results will be made available to commercial entities that provide test sets to
interested professionals. The additional development required at this point involving the
creation of visual and audio materials and the distribution can be undertaken by a commercial
entity. Specifically, Harcourt Assessment Inc. has indicated interest in the development of
cross-linguistic tests for language problems in children.
A second, much smaller group of likely end-users are researchers working on language
impairment from different perspectives. One area of growing interest is the genetics of
language. A genetic cause of SLI has been suggested by studies of family histories (Bishop
1995). Recently, the gene responsible has been determined in one case of severe SLI (Lai et
al. 2001). New tests for the phenotype of SLI could be used by future research in genetics.
