Sharon Armon-Lotem - Biography#

Sharon Armon-Lotem is a full professor at the Faculty of Humanities and a member of the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University (Israel) and heads the Bilingual Language Acquisition Lab (https://www.sharon-armon-lotem.com). She is a psycho-socio-linguist who studies typical and atypical language development in monolingual and multilingual children with a special focus on Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). She was the Chair of COST Action IS0804 "Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment", an international interdisciplinary network, leading the development of the LITMUS battery (http://bi-sli.org). Within this Action she also helped coordinating the design of the LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task, now available in 29 languages (https://www.litmus-srep.info). She further collaborated in COST Actions A33, where she coordinated the study of the Passive structure across 11 typologically different languages.

Sharon Armon-Lotem has been Principal Investigator in research projects funded by the Binational Science Foundation (BSF,2021-2025), German-Israel Foundation (GIF, 2011 - 2014), BMBF (The German Ministry of Education, 2007 - 2010), Israel Science Foundation (ISF, several grants from 2003 to the present – for studying English-Hebrew, Russian-Hebrew, Yiddish-Hebrew and Arabic speaking children). Her applied research, on large scale assessment and intervention, was funded by the Israel Ministries of Education (2016 - 2017,2021 - 2022), Health (2025 - 2027) and Science (2024 - 2026).

Sharon Armon-Lotem supervised 22 PhD students and 18 MA students (all defended, 2003 - present). She is the Chair of Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics (since 2022), an Evaluator for the council for Higher Education, and a former member of the Executive Committee of IASCL (the International Association for the Study of Child Language, 2017 - 2023). She is also a Co-Founder of MULTI for ALL Ltd., an AI based language screening platform for preschool children (https://gomulti.org).

Sharon Armon-Lotem communicates research to lay audiences, e.g. as a partner in the Erasmus+ scheme “Teacher Education About Multilingualism” (TEAM, Poznan University 2020-2023, https://team.amu.edu.pl) she was responsible for the generation of a curriculum and online resources to educate teachers and teachers in training about typical and atypical language development in multilingual children. This resulted in a YouTube channel with subtitles in 10 languages (https://www.youtube.com@TEAMultilingual) and an open education resource available to the general public. She further conducts workshops for parents and teachers of bilingual children as well as Speech and Language Therapists in understudied populations (e.g., Yiddish and Arabic speakers). As the director of Bilingualism Matters, Israel, she cooperates with other Bilingualism Matters Branches in the dissemination of scientific knowledge related to bilingual language development.