| Child Language Research Laboratory
(Laurence
B. Leonard,
Director)
Since 1978, members of the Child Language Research
Laboratory have been conducting studies designed to
uncover the nature of language disorders in children.
Progress in understanding these disorders should lead
to more effective intervention approaches and to methods
of early identification.
For much of this period, the research team has focused
on children with specific language impairment (SLI).
These children have significant difficulties acquiring
spoken language and are at risk for reading problems
when they reach school age. They are a puzzle because
factors often associated with language learning deficits
are not present in these children. Children with SLI
show normal hearing, age-appropriate scores on nonverbal
tests of intelligence, and no evidence of neurological
impairment. The prevalence of SLI may be as high as
7% during the preschool years.
The studies conducted by the research team have dealt
with a wide variety of questions concerning the language
comprehension and production abilities of children with
SLI. In recent years, much of this research has concentrated
on these children’s apparent difficulty with certain
grammatical details. When these children reach the
point of using simple sentences, they often leave out
small “grammatical” words (such as is and of)and
grammatical endings (such as past tense –ed and
possessive ’s) to a greater extent than we see
in younger, typically developing children. These difficulties
in constructing sentences often persist at least through
the preschool years, and represent one of the ways that
children with SLI can be most easily identified. Our
research team has been exploring factors that may be
at the heart of these difficulties, as well as methods
that might be used to help these children overcome these
difficulties more quickly.
One way we are attempting to discover the source of
the children’s grammatical difficulties is to examine
SLI from a crosslinguistic perspective. Through the
study of children with SLI who are acquiring very different
languages, in which grammatical notions such as past
tense and possession are expressed in markedly divergent
ways, the research team hopes to discover the common
denominator – the core of the severe grammatical difficulty.
Thus far, studies of English have been supplemented
by investigations of Italian, Hebrew, Swedish, Spanish,
and, most recently, Cantonese. We are fortunate to
be working with an excellent group of researchers who
are experts in these particular languages.
We are also conducting a major language intervention
study with the aim of discovering effective ways of
helping children learn to use grammatical forms in a
consistent manner. In this project, children participate
in small group and individual therapy sessions designed
to teach grammatical details in an informal, play-based
format. To learn more about this program, click here
Child
Language Program.
Every summer our lab, in collaboration with other members
of the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences,
conducts a research program for children with SLI.
Children in the program participate in both research
and language therapy activities. To learn more about
our summer research program, click here Summer
Fun.
The Child Language Research Laboratory team consists
of faculty and staff members, postdoctoral fellows,
doctoral students, and Masters level students. Laurence
B. Leonard serves as Director. Patricia Deevy is the
Coordinator of our crosslinguistic laboratory activities,
Barbara Brown is the Coordinator of the Child Language
Program.
Research Staff
Barbara
Brown
Barb holds a Master’s degree in Speech-Language
Pathology (CCC-SLP), and is particularly interested
in language development and disorders in young children.
She is a Research Associate coordinating the Child
Language Program, an intervention research project
focused on three-year-olds with specific language
impairment.
Patricia Deevy
Pat earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst, where her research
focused on theoretical models of adult language
processing. She currently serves as full-time Research
Associate and coordinates the lab activities of
the Crosslinguistic project. Her recent work deals
with how on-line language processing mechanisms
might interact with grammatical representations
to affect language performance in children with
specific language impairment. Curriculum
Vitae
Denise Finneran
Denise received her undergraduate degree and M.A. in Speech-Language Pathology (CCC-SLP) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. For her Master's thesis, she examined children's comprehension of Wh- questions and quantifiers. She worked as a speech-language pathologist in a variety of settings before coming to Purdue University. She is interested in language development and disorders in children.
Robert Kurtz
Robert earned a Bachelor's degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Goshen College and a Master's degree in Linguistics from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His interests include ethnolinguistics and language acquisition in bilingual children.
Elgustus J. Polite
Gus obtained a Bachelor's degree in Speech Pathology and Audiology from Southern University and A&M College and a Master's degree in Speech-Language Pathology from Purdue University. He holds the CCC-SLP and worked for two years as a speech-language pathologist in the Baltimore City Public School system before returning to Purdue University. He is currently working on his Ph.D. in Speech-Language Science at Purdue. His interests include speech-language development in children with SLI and in culturally and linguistically diverse populations.
|
