Current Studies

The Children's Vocabulary Project

The Children's Vocabulary Project advances understanding of the word learning problems associated with developmental language disorder (DLD).

In previous years of the project, we learned that:

• Children with DLD have difficulty learning new words in "incidental" contexts where they hear the new word, but no direct instruction is provided. They do better when they are given direct instruction, but still not as well as their peers.
• Children with DLD have difficulty learning from text, whether they are listening or reading it themselves.
• At least in the early stages of learning a word, the form of the word—its sounds and the sequence of those sounds—tends to be harder for children with DLD to learn than what the word refers to.
• One way to improve word learning is to separate the word from the thing that it names. For example, we taught children with DLD and those with typical language development the names of aliens, and they learned the names (word forms) better if we said the name before or after we showed them the alien (what the word names/picture) than when we said the name and showed the alien at the same time.
• Another way to help children with DLD learn words is to have them practice retrieving and saying the word. Active practice (saying the word) is more useful than passive study (listening to the word).

In the current stage of the Children's Vocabulary Project, we are investigating two questions:

• Not all children with DLD find word learning to be hard. We hypothesize that children who are more vigilant in maintaining attention to spoken messages are able to compensate for their word-learning problems.
• DLD is not only a problem with word learning; it affects other aspects of language. We hypothesize that word-learning problems cascade to impede other aspects of language processing, such as sentence comprehension.

To enroll in the Children's Vocabulary Project, click here​.

The Language and Me Project

The Language and Me Project is designed to explore gender differences in the need for and receipt of language services. We know boys are twice as likely to receive language intervention as girls. We will determine whether girls and boys with DLD differ in their:

• profiles of language difficulties
• ways of compensating for language difficulties
• tendencies to mask language difficulties

What we find will help to ensure that both boys and girls receive the support they need. To enroll in the Language and Me Project, click here.​