Berlin subproject of www.cladproject.eu
Many language impairments are due to a genetic risk factor, affecting approximately 10% of all children. Undiagnosed language impairment can have significant long-term effects for affected individuals. The genetic risk factors most adversely affect individuals from low socio-economic background.
The CLAD project improves the situation of language impaired individuals by developing a set of diagnostic techniques that allow a fast and easy diagnosis of language impairment. CLAD targets five languages: Rumanian, German, Italian, English, and Lithuanian. The strategy of the CLAD project follows that of the GAPS test developed for English by H van der Lely (2007): CLAD determines the validity of a set of clinical markers for types of language impairment. CLAD broadly targets phenomena in semantics/pragmatics and morphophonology/morphosyntax that current linguistic knowledge predicts to be clinical markers for language impairment across the five languages: scope, implicatures, question exhaustivity, quantifiers, agreement, adjective gradation, and consonant clusters. We expect that these tests will provide a profile of SLI that is largely uniform across the five languages.