Annick De Houwer
Annick De Houwer (PhD in Linguistics from the University of Brussels, 1988) is Research Professor of Communication at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, where she is also Director of the Research Group Language, Media and Socialization. She has an appointment as guest-professor at the University of Ghent in the Speech and Hearing Division, and holds the title of Collaborative Investigator to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.A.).
Dr. De Houwer is the author or editor of several books, and has published extensively in international scientific journals and books. Until recently, she was the General Editor of the John Benjamins Publishing Company book series IMPACT: Studies of Language and Society. Together with Steven Gillis she is the co-editor of the official book series publication of the International Association for the Study of Child Language called Trends in Language Acquisition Research (also a John Benjamins publication).
Dr. De Houwer’s main research specialization concerns bilingual acquisition in young children. Her monograph The Acquisition of Two Languages from Birth: a Case Study (Cambridge University Press) and her chapter on ‘Bilingual Acquisition’ in the Blackwell Handbook of Child Language are widely cited in publications on bilingual children. Her current research is primarily focused on finding connections between language input and bilingual development, both on a macro and a micro-level. Among others, she is coordinating a research project on 60 mono- and bilingual families in Flanders (in cooperation with Dr. Marc Bornstein, National Institutes of Child Health and Development, U.S.A.). Other research projects she is currently in charge of concern the language use of Dutch-speaking adolescents, child-directed speech in monolingual Dutch-speaking families, discourse organization in families with young children, and the practice of intralingual subtitling of Dutch television programs in Flanders. She is also finalizing a large-scale sociological study of language use in families in Flanders.