Radboud DLD Fund

A child’s first year of life is very important for their language development. However, problems with language development are often diagnosed far too late in the Netherlands. This is unfortunate because there is substantial evidence that early intervention is more effective. A language development problem is often recognised too late. The brain develops extremely fast so the earlier a problem is recognised the better. By the time the child is three years old, we are already too late, and the child will fall behind.

The foundation of our communication is created in the first 1000 days of our lives. Unfortunately, language deficiencies are often not apparent until later. This is not surprising since a child speaks very little in that first period. Therefore, it is very important that we pay close attention to the language development of babies and young children. The Radboud DLD Fund (TOS-Fonds) is intended to support scientific research into developmental language disorders; to be able to detect these disorders earlier and treat them effectively.

What is DLD?
A developmental language disorder (DLD) is a neurocognitive developmental disorder. This means that language is less well processed in the brain. A child with DLD has great difficulty speaking or understanding language. Consequently, the child’s language and speech development proceeds differently from its peers. Children with DLD hear well, learn their native language slowly and with difficulty, have normal intelligence, have difficulty remembering sounds and words, find grammar difficult, find it difficult to deal with their emotions and have problems with making plans.

Radboud DLD Fund
The fund was set up by Kino Jansonius, a clinical linguist and speech therapist. She was an academic researcher at the Institute of Phonetic Sciences (IFA) at the University of Amsterdam, where she studied the speech and language of infants with a cleft lip and children with DLD. She was also involved there with premature and drug-dependent newborns. Her PhD research (1999) was on infants with a cleft lip and the language skills of those children when they were two years old. In addition, the IFA closely studied the communicative development of these babies and toddlers in consultation with their parents. Kino hopes that research into early speech recognition, speech production and communication will become standard in university research centres for babies in the Netherlands, so that language problems can be recognised on time and be effectively treated in consultation with the parents.

Foto: Jose Ibarra, Unsplash

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€50 10-03-2023 | 15:03 Een mooi fonds uit een warm professioneel hart. En: voor niets gaat de zon op. Goede voortzetting van jullie wetenschappelijk onderzoek.
€35 23-02-2023 | 12:03