Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
The Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Waisman Center is currently recruiting children ages 2 through 5 to participate in research on language development in monolingual and bilingual children. If your child speaks either only Spanish, or both English and Spanish, you may qualify to participate. Some of our studies are …
Individuals with cerebellar ataxia (CA) caused by cerebellar degeneration exhibit larger reactive compensatory responses to unexpected auditory feedback perturbations than neurobiologically typical speakers, suggesting they may rely more on feedback control during speech. We test this hypothesis by examining variability in unaltered speech. Previous studies of typical speakers have demonstrated a reduction in formant variability (centering) observed during the initial phase of vowel production from vowel onset to vowel midpoint.
Title: Comparing tense and agreement productivity in boys with fragile X syndrome, children with developmental language disorder, and children with typical development Legend: Pattern of tense and agreement productivity across boys with fragile X syndrome (FXS), children developmental language disorder (DLD), and children with typical development (TD). The solid line indicates the median and the cross …
A single-word identification test was used to study speech production in children and adults with Down syndrome (DS) to determine the developmental pattern of speech intelligibility with an emphasis on vowels.
Weak central coherence (processing details over gist), poor oral language abilities, poor suppression, semantic interference, and poor comprehension monitoring have all been implicated to affect reading comprehension in individuals with ASD.
“We found that the folks with cerebellar damage responded to these unpredictable changes to a larger extent than those without any damage,” says Parrell. “It was totally unexpected.”
Verbal trait disorders encompass a wide range of conditions and are marked by deficits in five domains that impair a person’s ability to communicate: speech, language, reading, spelling, and writing. Nonword repetition is a robust endophenotype for verbal trait disorders that is sensitive to cognitive processes critical to verbal development, including auditory processing, phonological working memory, and motor planning and programming.
Title: Longitudinal development of communication in children with cerebral palsy between 24 and 53 months: Predicting speech outcomes Legend: (Left) Longitudinally-assessed word intelligibility score (%) by age and time since child was first able to speak. Thin lines are individual children. Thick lines are group means as a function of time (months) since child was …
Title: Brief Report: Fast mapping predicts differences in concurrent and later language abilities in children with ASD. Legend: Receptive and expressive language at age 3½ and age 5½ by fast mapping profile group. PLS-4 = Preschool Language Scale, 4th Edition. Error bars represent one standard error. Left panel: At age 3½, poor learners had significantly lower receptive …
Title: Examining the Language Phenotype in Children with Typical Development, Specific Language Impairment, and Fragile X Syndrome Legend: Group performance on the Third Person Singular Probe and Past Tense Probe of the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment Citation: Haebig, E., Sterling, A., & Hoover, J. (in press). Examining the language phenotype in children with typical …
