Project Updates

2020:

In accordance with the measures to reduce the spread of the corona virus, the data collection of our validation study had to be paused. We worked hard to transition from in person study visits to virtual study visits. Take a look at the poster [link] and the three minute video [link to video] that were made for our presentation at the 2020 Kids Brain Health Conference!

Online data collection is expected to be completed by the end of November. Much to our regret, we weren’t able to find an alternative and effective way to carry out assessments with the participants of the feasibility study.

In February, Mussa made his television debut on CHCH Morning Live [more here:  https://www.chch.com/improving-kids-communication/]! Together with Dr. Gorter, they talked about the importance of autonomous, reliable language assessments, and what it’s like to communicate non-verbally. We couldn’t be prouder!

2019:

Jael Bootsma, Johanna Geytenbeek and Jan Willem Gorter wrote a letter to the editor of Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology to stress the importance of reliable assessment of cognitive abilities such as language comprehension in children with severe impairments. Read the letter here

2018:

A stakeholder meeting was held in June of 2018. This meeting included Academic Researchers, Research Staff, Students, Speech Language Pathologists, Occupational Therapists, Professional Linguists, and parents of children with CP. Several researchers from the original Dutch C-BiLLT team attended the meeting in person, and others joined the meeting via teleconference. The first step of the meeting was to bring together a group of ~10 SLPs/Linguists for a consensus meeting to:

  • Review the English items to determine whether the semantic and grammatical concepts and levels of complexity have been retained and that concepts are relevant to English-speaking children, and
  • Ensure linguistic differences between the two languages have been taken into consideration such as vocabulary, morphology and word order.

The version of the C-BiLLT that was created using the results from this consensus meeting was used in the pilot test. In the pilot test, Canadian children reviewed the 86 C-BiLLT items. They were invited to share feedback on the wording, the image, and the concept of all items. The resulting version of the C-BiLLT is currently being used to test its validity, reliability and feasibility.