A Knowledge Base Supporting the Assessment of Language Impairment in Bilingual Children

It has been estimated that majority of children worldwide learn two languages before puberty. As bilingualism often comes with errors it is difficult to diagnose whether a child has a language impairment or if the errors come from being less fluent in both languages. Especially for speech therapists who only know one out of two (or more) languages, it can be a difcult task. In this research, the goal is to develop a knowledge base with information on common minority languages spoken in the Netherlands that has a clear structure and is user-friendly. The research question focuses on how to improve the existing knowledge structure to help speech therapists work with bilingual children that have a possible Specifc Language Impairment (SLI) diagnosis. This is achieved by focusing on what type of information is necessary for speech therapists and how that information flows through the knowledge base.

We present a case study in improving a collaborative wiki for linguistic diagnostics using an in-depth, structured and user-centric
method. This method utilizes extensive user studies with professional users. We show that this approach can identify structural
issues at the level of the information architecture as well as the User Interface of a web site.