Children's Language and Literacy Impairments

Podcasts from the Oxford Study of Children's Communications Impairments particularly focusing on Professor Dorothy Bishop's research. The primary aim of it is to increase our understanding of why some children have specific language impairment (SLI), a condition diagnosed when the child has unusual difficulty in language acquisition, despite normal development in other areas. "The approach taken in this programme is to obtain convergent evidence using a range of methods and populations. The question can be addressed at three levels: behavioural, neurological, and etiological. At the behavioural level, we can ask what it is about language learning that gives these children so much difficulty. In particular, we shall focus on the role of auditory perceptual deficits in causing SLI. At the neurological level, we will look for differences in brain processing between children with SLI and other groups. At the etiological level, the goal is to document genetic and environmental influences that can account for phenotypic variation in language development."