Rehabilitation and Educational Training

Dr. Osnat Segal

The journey of early language acquisition

One of the most interesting questions in the field of language acquisition is how a newborn becomes a speaker of its native language within the first three years of life .

Understanding early language -learning processes, from infancy, is highly important in order to : gain insight on the typical and atypical courses of language acquisition, identify developmental difficulties as early as possible, and assess the influence of interaction, exposure and use of language on the processes of language learning . My goal as a researcher and communication disorders clinician is to study the aforementioned processes of early language development in typically developing infants as a basis for understanding these processes in special populations including children with hearing loss, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), children with developmental language disorder (DLD), children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), and children from low socioeconomic status (LSES).

Osnat Segal, PhD, is at the Department of Communication Disorders, School of Health Professions. Dr. Segal earned her BA, MA and PhD in Communication Disorders at Tel Aviv University. Her doctoral studies focused on speech perception and language acquisition in infants. During her PhD she established the first dedicated laboratory in Israel for assessing processes in speech perception and language acquisition in infants. Her post-doctoral studies focused on recognition of morphological patterns by infants learning Hebrew, and took place at Tel Aviv University and at the Department of Language and Linguistics Science, University of York. She is the Chair of the Israeli Speech Hearing and Language Association (ISHLA), and an executive board member of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (IALP).

TAU Faculty of Medicine