Biodata

Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology in 1996, PhD in Psychology in 2003 and Master in Disturbances of Hearing and Speech by the University of Barcelona. She has worked in different universities (UB, UNED and UOC), and since 2001, she is Professor at the University of Islas Baleares (UIB). She is currently University Lecturer and holds the positions of Deputy Director of the Department of Applied Pedagogy and Psychology of Education, and Secretary of PhD in Education at the UIB. Moreover, she is Secretary of the International Association for the Study of Language Acquisition.

She is principal investigator of the Research Group I+DEL: Investigación, Desarrollo, Educación y Lenguaje in the Institut of Recerca i Innovació Educativa (IRIE) of the UIB, and she has been recognized two periods of investigation (decade) and three periods of teaching (five-year period). Her researches have included topics as acquisition of language, difficulties of language, bilingualism and philology. She is author of several international indexed articles in magazines with impact factor and different books, chapter of books, evaluation tests, articles and national and international congress.

Bilingüismo y educación en las dificultades del lenguaje

Traditionally and generally speaking, it has been considered as not advisable the fact that the children with language difficulties learn a second language, since the learning of two languages can imply a major difficulty than the learning of only one language. However, current studies have shown that, despite this major difficulty, bilingual children with language difficulties, they don´t show more problems and they are even better in some linguistic aspects than monolingual children with this kind of difficulties. Recent studies have also shown that bilingual people have an advantage on some executive functions. This improvement in the cognitive skills in the bilingual children can be acting as a protection factor of the difficulties of language producing this effect of improvement that is observed in the bilingual children with language difficulties.

In the presentation first it will be shown the specific characteristics of the bilingual acquisition of language and the peculiarities of the cognitive capacities. Secondly, it will be presented the studies that describe the process of development of the bilingual children with language difficulties. Thirdly, it will be extracted the involvements that this studies have towards to education, evaluation and reeducation of children with language difficulties in bilingual contexts.