Dr Daniela Gatt graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) degree in Communication Therapy from the University of Malta in 1995. She subsequently practised as a speech-language pathologist in a range of settings that included community clinics, a special school and a geriatric hospital. She obtained her M.Ed. (Bilingualism in Education) from the University of Birmingham in 2001. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Communication Therapy of the Faculty of Health Sciences. She lectures on Developmental Language Disorders, Prevention and Early Intervention of Communication Disorders, Clinical Semantics and on Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in the Early Years, among others. She was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Malta in 2010. Her thesis investigated early vocabulary production in children brought up in Maltese-speaking families. In 2007, her doctoral research earned her the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics Student Award for Excellence in Research. Her present research interests include the language skills of bilingual children with and without language impairment, as well as the early identification of bilingual language delay. She is a member of the European Network on Communicative Development Inventories and of the Research Consortium Development of a Novel Device to Support Children with Language Impairment in a Bilingual Context (SPEECHIE) (Project R&I-2015-042 funded by the Malta Council for Science and Technology through the Technology Development Programme 2016). She is an Associate Editor of the Malta Journal of Health Sciences.
bilingual narrative skills
bilingual vocabulary skills
Developmental Language Disorder
bilingual language development
early identification of bilingual language difficulties
CMT4514 - Language Pathology and Communication Therapy 1
EPE2003 - Sharing Responsibilities with Families and Pluralistic Communities in Early Childhood Education
Research work in progress: Dr Gatt is currently investigating the lexical development of Maltese-speaking children as they receive systematic exposure to the English language through schooling. This research project is being funded by the University of Malta.
Involvement in projects: Within the COST Action IS0804 research network, Dr Gatt is involved in cross-linguistic research on the vocabulary size of bilingual children aged 24 to 35 months. Dr Gatt is also contributing to another cross-linguistic study within the same Action that addresses lexical processing in bilingual preschoolers.
