Carmela Miniscalco

About Carmela Miniscalco

Carmela Miniscalco is a professor of speech-language pathology, affiliated with the Gillberg Neuropsychiatry Centre, University of Gothenburg. She has worked clinically with children with language and communication disorders for more than 30 years.  She had a position as an Associate professor at the Speech and Language Pathology Unit, Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden until 2018. Carmela works clinically as a speech and language pathologist at the Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatry Unit, Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg. Earlier, she worked for several years within the Central Child Health Care services.

She is the author of about 55 scientific articles and a few book chapters on language and communication difficulties and their relationship to neuropsychiatric disabilities. Her main interests in clinic, research and teaching are language and communication development, the occurrence of language disorders in children with autism and/or other neurodevelopmental disorders or medical conditions and early identification/screening.

Research interests

Carmela's research has shown that it is possible to identify children with developmental language disorder (DLD) at age 2.5 y of age with a screening program she developed, now in use as one of two valid screening methods in Sweden. Children who fail this screening are at high risk of having persistent language problems at age 6 y and appear to be at high risk of autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, or both at age 7-8 years. Problems with retelling stories, reading and nonword repetition are also present at school age. Currently, a follow-up of how these now young adults, who were carefully mapped as children (at 2.5 years, 4 years, 6 years, and 7-8 years) fared in terms of eligibility for upper secondary school, ICD-10 diagnoses in open and closed specialist care, employment etc. The project is based on routinely collected register data from national authority registers.

Funding

Principal Investigator: 

• 2012-2015: Young children with autism: Knowledge, method development and intervention from a participation perspective. Project number 2012-0356B Arvsfonden 3 years (2 428 000 SEK). Completed 2015.
• 2014-2019:  FORTE 3 years (3 430 000 SEK; Dnr 2013-094) Core language abilities in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A population-based longitudinal study. Completed 2019.
• 2019-2022: FORTE 3 years (3 030 000 SEK; Dnr 2018-00389) A population-based study on language development in children exposed to per- and polyfluorinated compounds (PFAS). Completed 2022.
• 2019-2020: Agreement on Medical education and Research ALF 2 years (1 500 000 SEK) Uppföljning av språkförmåga och utvecklingsprofiler hos barn med tidigt identifierade språkstörningar. Completed 2020.
• 2022-2024 Agreement on Medical education and Research ALF 3 years (1 200 000 SEK) Stability and change in children with developmental language disorder from toddlerhood into adulthood. Ongoing.

Contact information