Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences

Language Sciences Laboratories

Adult Cognition and Language Laboratory (Murray)

The Adult Cognition and Language Laboratory conducts research into the variety of acquired neurogenic communication disorders associated with stroke (e.g., aphasia, right hemisphere brain damage) and progressive diseases (e.g., Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease). Emphasis is on determining how best to assess and treat these disorders by identifying possible relationships among impairments of language, attention, memory, and executive function abilities.

Baby Language Laboratory (Gershkoff-Stowe)

Research in the Baby Language Lab focuses on early word learning in normally developing children and those at risk for language and learning disability. A main interest is the relationship between language and general cognitive processing abilities (e.g., memory, retrieval, categorization). Current projects investigate the shared mechanisms that underlie (1) the vocabulary spurt, (2) fast-mapping, and (3) the gap between word comprehension and production in children, 16-24 months of age.

Bilingual Language Laboratory (R. Anderson)

The Bilingual Research Lab focuses on studying child second language acquisition. Its purpose is to examine typical and atypical language development in children who are exposed to two languages, with the goal of identifying clinical markers that may aid us in diagnosing language disorders in this population. Our atypical population is children with specific language impairment. Although the main subject population is Spanish-English bilingual children, research with other language groups is also conducted. In addition, work with monolingual Spanish-speaking children is also under way. At present, our main research focus is studying first language loss in Spanish-speaking children with typical language learning skills and children with specific language impairment.
Other research has included phonological development in young sequential learners and rule-learning strategies in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment.

Language Laboratory (Connell)

Research in the Language Laboratory focuses on learning problems of specific language-impaired children, with special attention given to rule-learning capacities.

Learnability Laboratory (Gierut)