Monday, February 27, 2006 
2005-2006/042

Professor at U. of I. March 14 to give lecture on
language impairment and 2nd language learners

URBANA—Professor Kathryn Kohnert of the department of speech-hearing-language sciences at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, will give a lecture entitled, “Common Ground?: ‘Specific’ Language Impairment and Second Language Learners,” on Tuesday, March 14, at 7 p.m., in Lucy Ellis Lounge, 1080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana, on the U. of I. campus.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

In her talk, Kohnert will address two different types of language learners: children with developmental primary or "specific" language impairment (SLI) and children who learn two languages, beginning at different ages and stages in their cognitive, social and emotional development.

She will present results from a series of studies designed to investigate potential areas of overlap and divergence in basic processing skills between typically developing children who speak English as a first (and only) language, Spanish-speakers who have learned English as their second language, and monolingual English-speaking children with SLI.

Theoretical and practical implications of study results will be discussed.

The lecture is sponsored by the U. of I. Secondary Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) program. SLATE is a multidisciplinary program for students with an interest in second language acquisition and second language teaching.