Hearing and Speech Sciences

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Research

The University of Maryland is a Carnegie Research-I institution. Our faculty receive funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and a number of private foundations to carry out cutting-edge research. HESP faculty have authored more than 100 books, chapters and articles just in the past few years. Moreover, most of our faculty are engaged in interdisciplinary research projects with faculty in other parts of the campus.

Multi-faculty Research Projects

LEAP Research Project (Dr. Froma Roth, Colleen Worthington, and Dianne Handy, Investigators): Promoting Awareness of Sounds in Speech (PASS) is a phonological awareness intervention program designed specifically for preschool children with speech and language impairments. It consists of three training modules: Rhyming, Blending, and Segmentation, and is implemented each semester with eligible children who attend LEAP by a team of graduate and undergraduate students under the direction of faculty.

Perceptual Precursors of Early Language Development
(Dr. Nan Bernstein-Ratner and Dr. Rochelle Newman, Investigators): What types of infant abilities might predict successful language acquisition? Are there skills that, if not present during infancy, suggest a child is at risk for language impairments later in life? This study is performing language assessments on children aged 4 - 6 who had participated in language experiments while they were infants, to attempt to isolate perceptual abilities that are predictive of successful language acquisition, as well as those which appear to be deficient in children with depressed language acquisition profiles.

Affiliations

Our Department is also closely linked with a number of interdisciplinary programs, providing our students with a wide range of research and educational opportunities.

The program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) includes over 80 faculty from 14 departments, and offers a wide range of classes and seminars.

The Center for Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing (C-CEBH) includes 11 faculty from 5 departments on campus and has a close collaboration with researchers at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) , such that these NIH researchers are available to serve as co-mentors on research projects with UM faculty. For more information on the NIH & C-CEBH partnership, click here.

We also have strong ties with Cognitive Neuroscience of Language laboratory, part of the Department of Linguistics, with access to magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording, as well as more traditional imaging approaches.

In addition to resources on campus, our central location means our students have opportunities to collaborate with researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC), and the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

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