Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
Content archived on 2024-06-18

Discourse Coherence in Bilingualism and SLI

Objective

Due to the growth of migration, bilingualism in Europe is increasing considerably. Russian speakers constitute a significant proportion of these immigrants. Indeed, Russian is the most frequent minority language in Germany with more than 2 million speakers. Parallel to the growing bilingualism, children show increasing problems in language development. Professionals working with children lack clinical assessment tools for an early recognition of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual children and often confuse the effects of bilingualism and SLI. The increasing needs for efficient intervention compel researchers to provide scientifically valid tools for clinical treatments. Current clinical diagnostic tools are mainly based on testing bilingual morphosyntactic phenomena, with much less attention paid to disentangling SLI and bilingualism. The studies on bilingualism and SLI also pay only little attention to the domain of discourse coherence, even though discourse competence is a key property of successful communication.

This project aims to fill the gap by providing insights into combined and separate effects of bilingualism and SLI in the domain of referential and relational discourse coherence. To this end, we will collect and analyze comprehension and production data from bilingual children. The target population are native speakers of Russian acquiring Dutch or German either from birth or from around age 3 on. The performance of bilingual children will be compared to that of monolingual controls with and without SLI.

The research teams participating in this project (Utrecht, Berlin, St. Petersburg) will bring in their expertise in the acquisition of Dutch, German and Russian, respectively. Methodologically, the project will benefit from the participants’ complementary experience with elicitation procedures (Berlin) and eye-tracking techniques (Utrecht). Collection of Russian-language data in St. Petersburg will provide the project with control group-data.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP7-PEOPLE-2010-IRSES
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MC-IRSES - International research staff exchange scheme (IRSES)

Coordinator

UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT
EU contribution
€ 108 300,00
Address
HEIDELBERGLAAN 8
3584 CS Utrecht
Netherlands

See on map

Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

No data

Participants (1)

My booklet 0 0