UF Speech Development Lab Research Studies

The Speech Development Lab at the University of Florida is interested in how children acquire the abilities to recognize the phonetic-level structure of their native language and to produce speech with the gestural organization typical of their native language; what role the ability to recognize that structure plays in language processing; what conditions of childhood support the development of these skills; and precisely how perceptual processing of the speech signal is affected by conditions such as poverty, frequent severe ear infections, and hearing loss.

Current Research Studies
-Spectral and temporal processing in children with histories of otitis media with effusion.
-The relationship between vocabulary, phonemic awareness, and spectral processing in young children with hearing loss.
-Assessing whether the tactile presentation of low-frequency signals can prove the same supplemental information as auditory presentation of those signals.
-Exploring relationships between spectral processing, temporal processing, phonemic awareness, and lexicosyntactic knowledge in school-age children with and without reading disorders.