Ponente invitad@: Gabriel Cler.Neurobiology of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) across the lifespan

What: Neurobiology of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD): From Childhood to Adulthood

Where: BCBL Auditorium and Auditorium zoom room (If you would like to attend to this meeting reserve at info@bcbl.eu)

Who: Gabriel Cler, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, US

When:  Thursday,  May 14th at  12:00 PM/noon

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a common neurodevelopmental condition that affects communication and learning in 7.6% of the population (two children per classroom) and persists into adulthood. Despite its prevalence and impact, DLD remains under-identified and under-researched, in part because language difficulties can be surprisingly “invisible” in daily life, and in part because DLD falls between education, speech-language services, and healthcare, leaving many children without a formal label. In this talk, I will present a program of research using multimodal neuroimaging to identify neural correlates and consequences of DLD across the lifespan.

I will first present multimodal neuroimaging work linking variation in brain structure to language skills in children with DLD. I will then present new, unpublished work in adults with DLD combining functional neuroimaging with diffusion imaging to examine the behavioral and neural correlates of DLD in adulthood. I will close by introducing two ongoing research directions that move beyond traditional language analyses to test broader mechanisms and comorbidity: (1) pilot motor-learning work testing how domain-general learning systems relate to language performance, linking language development to broader learning and control circuits; and (2) recently funded work examining neural and behavioral overlap between DLD and dyslexia in bilingual children. Overall, the goal of the presented work and ongoing projects is a mechanistic, lifespan account of DLD grounded in converging structural and functional evidence.