Dr. Tessel Boerma

Biography

Tessel Boerma is a researcher at the Institute of Language Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and the University Medical Center Utrecht. Her research focuses on language development in challenging situations, particularly due to environmental factors and congenital conditions. She is currently working on a project that describes the language abilities of adolescents with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome and their relationship to mental health. Boerma has received a VENI-grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Additionally, she investigates the language skills of children born prematurely and the associations with early brain, cognitive, and motor development, supported by the Open Competition-XS grant from NWO. Boerma supervises a PhD project on vocabulary development in children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. She obtained her bachelor's degree from University College Utrecht and completed her research master's in Linguistics. Her PhD, awarded in 2017, investigated the linguistic and cognitive development of monolingual and multilingual children with developmental language disorder. She was awarded the Anéla-AVT Dissertation Prize for her work. Boerma is actively involved in the HUB '1001 days in the life of a child’ and conducts research on the impacts of early development on children's futures. She currently serves as an ambassador for 'DoY Early Childhood' and is engaged with a project exploring linguistic cognitive development disparities between children with genetic disorders and those with developmental language disorders.

Research Interests

Experience