Language & Literacy/Science of Reading
We look at how children’s language and metalinguistic skills develop, as well as how they are related to how children learn to read, spell, and write. This work focuses on children, their families, their teachers, and their communities. Here are some examples of this:
Multimodal Approaches to Testing and Prediction in Early Academic Achievement: English Skills in Grade 2 Children
Principal Investigator: Dr. Catherine McBride
Funder: Startup Funding
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to assess the English skills of children in grade 2 and to refine these tasks to create an open-source online assessment battery for screening reading disabilities in children.
WordBuilders: A Morphology Intervention for Pre-Readers
Principal Investigator: Dr. Rebecca Marks
Funder: Purdue Startup Funding
Purpose: Morphological awareness has been associated with literacy skills as early as age 5 (Marks et al., 2022), but is rarely formally taught. The aim of this project is to design, implement, and test the efficacy of direct instruction in morphological awareness in early childhood and its relation to other pre-literacy skills.
Retrieval-Based Word Learning in Developmental Language Disorder
Principal Investigator: Dr. Laurence B Leonard
Funder: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, NIH
Purpose: Examines whether the inclusion of retrieval practice facilitates the novel word learning of 4- and 5-year-old children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with typical language development (TD).
Audiovisual processing is specific language impairment (also known as developmental language disorder)
Principal Investigator: Dr. Natalya Kaganovich
Co-Principal Investigators/Co-Investigators: Dr. Laurence Leonard, Dr. Sharon Christ, Dr. Tamar Greenwell
Funder: NIH NIDCD
Purpose: This project aimed to determine what aspects of visual and audiovisual processing may be contributing to speech perception deficits in children with developmental language disorder.