Laura Ferinu Sanz

The audiovisual integration of speech in children with specific language impairment (SLI)

Her work here focuses on the audiovisual integration of speech in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). This research line focuses on bilingual children (Catalan-Spanish) with DLD, with the goal of observing whether they show different gaze and performance patterns in word recognition tasks, when the words are presented aurally, audiovisually or with over-articulation, compared with control groups, using the eye-tracking technique.

Statistical learning in children with specific language impairment (SLI)

This project analyses how the declarative model affects problems in lexical learning, and how the procedural model impacts upon grammar learning problems in children with SLI. Fundamentally, it studies the lexical system, in which phonological information and its associated meanings are deposited, and the grammatical system, considering the declarative model for the lexicon, and the procedural system for grammar.

Real-time lexical and morphosyntactic processing by children with specific language impairment (SLI)

The purpose of this research line is to study how children with SLI understand different words (lexical processing) and different morphological markers (morphological processing) of an utterance in real time. To study this issue, we use the eye-tracking methodology, which provides a natural means for analysing language processing in real time without introducing any other task beyond listening to utterances while looking at related scenes.