“Language is characteristic of humans. It is special how young children learn it so quickly while it is so complex. Language has a lot of impact on a person's life, it shapes and connects.”

Tessel Boerma is a researcher at the Institute for Language Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities and at the University Medical Center Utrecht. In Boerma's research, language development in challenging situations, for example due to environmental factors or congenital conditions, is a central theme. She is currently working on a project in which she describes language ability of adolescents with 22q11.2 deletionsyndrome and relates this to mental health. For this research, Boerma received a VENI-grant from NWO.

Background

Boerma obtained her bachelor's degree at the University College in Utrecht and then did the research master 'Linguistics: the study of the language faculty'. She obtained her PhD in 2017, investigating the linguistic and cognitive development of monolingual and multilingual children with and without a developmental language disorder. She received the Anéla-AVT Dissertation Prize for her dissertation. Currently, she is still working on improving the diagnosis of multilingual children with DLD. 

Boerma was also actively involved in the HUB 'The 1001 first days in the life of a child'. Together with geneticists, biologists, behavioral scientists and fellow linguists, she conducts research into the impact and consequences of brain and language development in young children. A good, but also a bad start determines the further development of a child to a large extent, which underlines the importance of the first 1001 days.

In addition, Boerma was involved in the 3T project as co-promotor of two PhD's and post-doc researcher. This project investigated the linguistic and cognitive development of children with a genetic disorder (the 22q11.2 deletion syndrome; 22q11DS) in comparison with children with a developmental language disorder (DLD).

In addition to her work as a researcher, Boerma is involved as a lecturer in the courses clinical linguistics, language and cognition in normal and disordered development, and language development in a social perspective. She also supervises students working on their internship or thesis.