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My lab's research focuses on bilingual and monolingual language acquisition, with particular emphasis on identifying Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in multilingual contexts. Through nationally and internationally funded projects, we examine how cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural, and environmental factors shape language development in children growing up with Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, English, and Amharic.

Multiple Israel Science Foundation (ISF) projects, conducted with Prof Joel Walters and Prof. Carmit Altman, have enabled us to investigate the interaction between DLD and socioeconomic status, track longitudinal language development in bilingual children, and develop diagnostic tools including sentence and non-word repetition tasks. Cross-cultural studies have examined teacher identification of language impairment in Russian-speaking children across Israel and Germany (German–Israeli Foundation and German BMBF funding).

Our assessment methodology builds on the LITMUS battery developed within COST Action IS0804, a European network on language impairment in multilingual settings that I chaired. These principles have guided our development of assessment tools in multiple languages, including Palestinian Arabic (ISF with Prof. Elinor Saiegh-Haddad) and recent work exploring Yiddish-Hebrew bilingual development in ultra-Orthodox communities (ISF with Prof. Altman and Dr. Kupersmitt). A second major focus involves narrative intervention studies, supported by the Binational Science Foundation in collaboration with Prof. Laida Restrepo and Prof. Carmit Altman. Collectively, these projects aim to deepen our understanding of multilingual language acquisition, improve DLD identification, and support inclusive clinical and educational interventions for bilingual children.