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 was appointed visiting Assistant Lecturer with the University of Malta in 2003 and took on a full-time Assistant Lecturer post in 2007. She was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Malta in 2010, following which she was promoted to Lecturer. She currently holds the post of Senior Lecturer with the Department of Communication Therapy of the Faculty of Health Sciences. She lectures on Specific Language Disorders in Childhood, Prevention and Early Intervention of Communication Disorders, Clinical Semantics and Blingual Lexical Acquisition in the Maltese Context among others.
Dr Gatt’s PhD 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 lexical skills in monolingual and bilingual children with and without language impairment, as well as the prevention and early intervention of language impairment. She has been awarded funds by the University of Malta to pursue research on the lexical skills of pre-schoolers and on the core vocabulary items used by young Maltese-dominant children. She is also currently involved in a project funded by the MCST Research and Innovation Programme titled Harnessing and Maximising the Potential of Next Generation Sequencing Technology: Specific Language Impairment. Dr Gatt is a member of the European Network on Communicative Development Inventories and is a Management Committee member of COST Action IS1406 (Enhancing children’s oral language skills across Europe and beyond: a collaboration focusing on interventions for children with difficulties learning their first language). She is Editor-in-Chief of the Malta Journal of Health Sciences. Further details on sample publications are available at: https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/danielagatt
Roles/duties in the project: To provide expertise on early vocabulary production in children brought up in bilingual settings who are typically-developing and who present with vocabulary delays, and on related assessment and therapy principles in order to establish the lexical functions and lexical content of the device, develops a methodology to evaluate the device from SLPs’, clients’ and guardians’ point of view, to mentor one M.Sc. by Research student focusing on the lexical aspects of the device, to attend internal project meetings and consortium meetings.