Research > Child Language & Developmental Psychopathology
Child Language & Developmental Psychopathology
Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health
Principal Investigator: Claudio Toppelberg, MD
About
the Principal Investigator
Dr. Toppelberg is a Harvard-trained child and adult psychiatrist and researcher. His expertise is the interface of normal and delayed language development with child and adolescent emotional/behavioral development and mental disorders. In a broader sense, he is interested in the relations of language problems and of language-based and other learning disabilities with developmental psychopathology.
Project Description
At Child Language & Developmental Psychopathology, we study the relation of child language development and mental health in childhood. We are interested in children’s emotional and behavioral lives with a focus on how they influence and are influenced by their language development. Our approach broadly includes cognitive, social and school functioning, and the role of psychosocial and biological stress, in the context of other risk and protective factors.
Elucidating resilience and vulnerability in the crucial interface between language and emotional/behavioral development will hopefully guide future research on mechanisms linking language and adaptation/psychopathology. We hope that this work will help shape the design of new empirically-based treatments for children at risk.
Our main current focus is on bilingual children of immigrants, through a longitudinal study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. This project follows close to 300 bilingual Latino children in 16 elementary public schools in the Boston area from kindergarten to second grade. Its results should have important implications for young Latino children, both for those who have multiple strengths and are on a successful/adaptive pathway, as well as for those at risk for long-term academic and social failure due to lack of language proficiency, language deficits or mental health problems. The principal aim of the study focuses on language competence (or its absence) as predictors of psychosocial adaptations (or childhood psychopathology), thinking about the emotional regulation and behavioral modulation functions of language. We are also interested in how cognitive functions involved in sound, visuo-spatial, and organizational processing affect these language/psychiatric relations.
The prestigious five-year NIH career development (K01) award provides support for research and continued research development.
For more information, please visit our two projects' websites:
Child Language and Developmental Psychiatry, http://www.hms.harvard.edu/cldp
Child Immigration and Developmental Psychiatry, http://www.hms.harvard.edu/cidp