“When young children speak little or not at all, the cause is not always clear,” says Paula Fikkert, researcher at the Baby & Child Research Center at Radboud University. “It could be a case of DLD, where the brain has more difficulty processing language. This is a neurocognitive developmental disorder. But children can also simply be late talkers or develop a language delay for other reasons. That’s why the diagnosis is often not made until after the age of three. At the Radboud DLD Fund, however, our mission is to create clarity within the first thousand days, so that we can already support very young children.”
Why it is important to recognize a language development disorder in children at an early stage
Can we treat toddlers at risk of DLD (Developmental Language Disorder) more effectively by using knowledge about language acquisition in children without DLD? That question is central to the pilot study by the Radboud DLD Fund and Kentalis. ‘The first thousand days are crucial when it comes to language acquisition, but we still know far too little about it.’”
This idea is also shared at the care organisation Kentalis, where young “at-risk children” are treated. A speech therapist developed a therapy, based on research by Fikkert and Levelt on language acquisition in “typical” children, which had not yet been tested. The Radboud DLD Fund financed a pilot study in which a small group of children received 12 weeks of therapy, including pre- and post-testing to track their progress. Fikkert: “The speech therapists were given hours to carry out the therapy, document it, and - with our help - analyze it. That way, we could use the available budget wisely.”
Place of articulation
Fikkert: “Children without DLD show a clear pattern in the kinds of words they learn first. They imitate sounds and form simple words with a single place of articulation. That’s the spot in the mouth where speech sounds are produced: lips, teeth, and the palate. Our hypothesis was that the same happens in children with DLD, except they need more time. We offered the children words with a single place of articulation that they already knew, then gradually made it more complex: p-o-p, b-oo-k. And k-i-p (chicken), which is very hard to pronounce because the sound is formed from the back to the front of the jaw. We found that some children progressed quickly. Their vocabulary grew, and their productivity increased. In other words: they started to speak a bit more, and with more variety. But with other children, this didn’t happen. We don’t really know why.”
The dictionary in your brain
Children with DLD often continue to have language problems, even if they build a reasonable vocabulary. This partly has to do with the time they need to retrieve the right words from their “mental dictionary” and use these words to predict what comes next. A child with DLD often needs more time to understand spoken sentences and stories than is available and then drops out.
Follow-up research
The pilot group was small, but the results are very promising, says Fikkert. “We published about it in a journal that is widely read by speech therapists. But to better understand the causes, larger-scale research with young children is needed. Unfortunately, that’s still a long way off, because research is expensive. So I really hope that follow-up studies will come. For children with DLD this is of vital importance, because sufficient language skills are essential to fully participate in society.”
Do you want to contribute to the Radboud DLD Fund?
The first year of life is incredibly important for a child’s language development.
The Radboud TOS Fund aims to promote scientific research to identify and treat language development problems (such as DLD/TOS) as early as possible, already in the first and second year of a child’s life. The fund makes scientific research into developmental language disorders possible to detect them earlier and treat them more effectively.
Contact information
- Organizational unit
- Faculty of Arts, Centre for Language Studies
- About person
- Prof. J.P.M. Fikkert (Paula)
- Theme
- Personal development, Language