Dr. Carmit Altman
Head of Child Development
Faculty of Education & The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center Bar Ilan University, Israel
Dr. Altman’s research in child language development is centered on an overarching interest of improving macro and micro language skills of preschool children with typical language development as well as children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). It draws from an interdisciplinary track in which theory and methodologies in education, linguistics, psychology and sociolinguistics come together. Her research program is motivated by four principal issues:
1. Development of language standards especially suited for bilingual children.
2. Disentangling the impact of bilingualism from the impact of impairment in the language of bilingual preschool children with DLD. This work began by identifying indicators of impairment unique to bilingualism and how they are manifested in each language.
3. Differences in macrostructure and microstructure narrative abilities as a means to profile the language of bilingual children.
4. Research-based bilingual narrative intervention (BINARI) in different bilingual populations.
These issues are at the heart of child development and relevant to societies with special needs.
Dr. Altman is Head of Child Development in the Faculty of Education. She is affiliated with the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Center at Bar-Ilan University. She is the deputy director of Bilingualism Matters, Israel and the Co-director of the Impact Center on Multilingualism and Multiculturalism across the Lifespan.
Her work has been published in the International Journal of Bilingualism, Applied Psycholinguistics, Plos One and Frontiers in Psychology. Her research has been supported by grants from the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation, the Israel Science Foundation and by the Israel Ministry of Education.