Child Language and Literacy Laboratory

Current Projects

Enhancing Vocal Communication with Graphical Social Cues

Funded by the National Science Foundation (Karahalios, PI), this project focuses on the development of computerized software aimed at facilitating communication development in children with speech-language development using contingent auditory and visual feedback. Preliminary data has focused on young children with developmental disability, such as verbal apraxia and autistic spectrum disorder, who struggle with the acquisition of communication through everyday experience. The project is currently centered in the Department of Computer Science, with Karrie Karahalios ( http://www-faculty.cs.uiuc.edu/~kkarahal/) and also involves collaboration with Jim Halle in the Department of Special Education (http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/sped/frp/halle).

The Western Reserve Reading Project (HD38075 & HD46167-03, Petrill, P.I.)

Funded by the NICHD, this longitudinal study focuses on the development of reading and related cognitive abilities in 350 twin pairs from throughout Ohio. Centered at Ohio State University, this project is carried out across multiple sites, including Case Western University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Florida State University, the Kennedy Krieger Institute, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Our UIUC branch focuses on the extent of genetic and environmental influences on children’s language development and disability, including the extent to which such factors may overlap with reading development. This work depends on the diligent and conscientious work of multiple research assistants who digitize and transcribe conversational language samples from the project so that we can derive meaningful measures such as mean length of utterance (MLU), number of different words (NDW), lexical diversity (D), Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS), and various pragmatic codes. Additional support for this project has come from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation New Investigator Award, the ASHA Advancing Academic-Research Careers (AARC) Award, the Pennsylvania State University Children, Youth, and Families Consortium, and the University of Illinois Campus Research Board.

A student digitizing conversational language samples from the Western Reserve Twin Project.

Development of a Parent-Report Measure of School-Age Language

Supported by the Mary Jane Neer Research Award for 2007, this pilot project brings together cross-university expertise in Speech and Hearing Science, Special Education, and Human Development and Family Science in order to improve the assessment of school-age language disabilities through the development of a new parent-report measure for school-age children. Including parents in the process of assessing children’s language skills is critical in maximizing the accuracy of professionals’ assessments and the effectiveness of clinicians’ interventions, yet there is currently no wide-spread parent report measure for school-age language ability. This project is in the process of collecting pilot data on the validity of a new parent-report measure for school-age language.