Child Language Doctoral Program

Participating Faculty

We are a cross-disciplinary program and our faculty is involved in research spanning many diverse fields of study. Their portfolios are dynamic and growing, so you will be directed to their most recent information.

Mabel L. Rice, Director

Susan Kemper, Graduate Advisor

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Ruth Ann Atchley, Associate Professor/Interim Chair, Department of Psychology.
Dr. Atchley engages in both psychophysiological and behavioral research designed to test psycholinguistic theories of language comprehension. More specifically, her work addresses issues of word comprehension, discourse comprehension, individual differences in language processing, and verbal creativity

Steven Barlow, Professor, Department of Speech-Language-Hearing: Sciences and Disorders.
Dr. Barlow's research interests focus on the neural mechanisms involved in sensorimotor integration among orofacial and vocal tract structures during speech, vocalization, and oromotor control in infants, children, and adults.  The theoretical underpinnings of neural plasticity associated with activity-dependent change are currently under investigation in premature infants at-risk for brain injury.  At the other end of the developmental spectrum, electrophysiological and mechanosensory psychophysical experiments are underway to explore the effects of deep brain stimulator implants on fine motor control in individuals with advanced forms of Parkinson's disease. Similar methods of investigation are also being applied to explore salient features of neuromotor and neurosensory reorganization in children undergoing facial reconstructive surgery due to congenital clefting.

Nancy Brady, Assistant Professor, Department of Speech-Language-Hearing: Sciences and Disorders.
Dr. Brady is interested in how individuals learn symbolic communication, including spoken language.  Her research has focused on acquisition of symbolic communication in individuals with developmental disabilities including autism.  In addition, she is studying early pragmatic skills in young children with developmental disabilities, focusing on negotiations of communication breakdowns.

Hugh W. Catts, Professor and Chair, Department of Speech-Language-Hearing: Sciences and Disorders.
Dr. Catts is interested in the relationship between oral and written language development/disorders.  His current research focuses on the language basis of reading and writing disabilities.  He is also interested in phonology and its association to written word recognition.

John Colombo, Professor, Department of Psychology/Director, Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies.
Dr. Colombo's main interests are in early cognitive and neurocognitive development, particularly as development in these domains pertain to language and intellectual outcomes. He has studied the predictive validity of biobehavioral markers of attention for language outcomes, and the effects of early nutritional status on cognitive and language development. His recent work has also examined autonomic function and associated biomarkers as a means for early identification of children at risk for intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Marc Fey, Professor, Department of Hearing and Speech, School of Allied Health, University of Kansas Medical Center.
Dr. Fey is interested primarily in the assessment and treatment of developmental impairments of speech and language.  His current research involves: (a) assessing the short- and long-term effects of grammar facilitation approaches; (b) acquisition and development of auxiliary verbs and related morphosyntax in children developing typically and in children with specific language impairment, (c) the developmental relationships between early phonological and grammatical impairments and later problems with written language.

Robert Fiorentino, Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics.
Dr. Fiorentino's research concerns the basic nature of linguistic representations and the operations they undergo, with a major focus on how these ingredients of language are neurally implemented and recruited in real-time processing.  He addresses these issues primarily using psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research methods, with an emphasis on the application of brain imaging techniques such as MEG, EEG, and fMRI to linguistic research.  His primary languages of research are English and Japanese.

Alison Gabriele, Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics.
Dr. Gabriele's research focuses on the acquisition of syntax and semantics by second language learners and bilingual children.  Her dissertation research looked at the acquisition of aspectual morphology by adult learners of English and Japanese.  She is beginning a project that will look at the L2 acquisition of the semantics of bare nominals by learners of Japanese

Andrea Follmer Greenhoot, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology.
Dr. Greenhoot’s primary interests are in cognitive development, with a special focus on memory development in children.  A central theme in her work is the interplay between memory development and other aspects of cognitive and social functioning.  Her recent research focuses on the impact of knowledge on recollective processes across development, and the retention of significant childhood memories into adulthood.  Her interests also include statistical methodology, with an emphasis on techniques for the analysis of developmental change.

Allard Jongman, Professor and Chair, Department of Linguistics.
Dr. Jongman conducts detailed acoustic and perceptual analyses of the speech signal to understand the complex interaction between phonetic, phonological, and lexical information.  His research also addresses questions of language learning, particularly the nature of the phonetic representations in learning a second language, and the way in which these representations are affected by one's native language categories.

Susan Kemper, Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychology.
Dr. Kemper has extended the study of language development across the life-span to the analysis of age-related changes in adults' language.  Her analyses of the spoken and written language of adults 60 to 90 years of age have focused on how subtle impairments of working memory affect language complexity. She is also involved in ongoing longitudinal studies of linguistic and cognitive changes in older adults, including adults with dementia and studies of speech accommodations to older adults.

Diane Frome Loeb, Associate Professor, Department of Speech-Language-Hearing: Sciences and Disorders.
Dr. Loeb's research has focused on the language abilities of preschoolers and toddlers.  She is currently addressing questions that are concerned with the interrelationship between and within the language system.  These include evaluating the relationship between syntactic categories and between the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and phonological properties of language.  Dr. Loeb's current interests also include the application of theoretical frameworks to normal and disordered populations and intervention efficacy issues.

Utako Minai, Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics.
Dr. Minai's research investigates children’s acquisition and use of knowledge about meaning in their first language. She conducts experimental studies using psycholinguistic methodologies, such as linguistic comprehension tasks and the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, to assess preschool-age children’s representation and real-time processing of meaning. Dr. Minai’s  recent research explores the relations among language acquisition (specifically the acquisition of meaning) and cognitive development.  She is also interested in cross-linguistic research on language acquisition, focusing in particular on studies involving both English- and Japanese-acquiring children.

Kathleen McCluskey-Fawcett, Director, University Honors Program and Professor, Clinical Child Psychology.
Dr. McCluskey-Fawcett's research interests are primarily in the area of infancy.  She is interested in the social interaction between infants and parents, and has done some research about the communication patterns between young children and their parents.  She is also interested in adolescent pregnancy and parenting and is currently conducting research on this topic.

Clifton Pye, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics.
Dr. Pye is interested in the acquisition of Native American languages and its implications for linguistic theory, language development, and language loss.  His primary focus is the acquisition of verb argument structure and its connection to semantic development.  His other interests include Mayan and Mixe-Zoquean linguistics, lexical meaning, language processing, and computational linguistics.

Mabel Rice, The Fred and Virginia Merrill Professor of Advanced Studies, Director of the Child Language Doctoral Program, and Director of the Biobehavioral Neurosciences in Communications Disorders Center.
Dr. Rice is interested in the grammatical impairments of children with specific language impairments, and the etiology of the impairments.  She also carries out studies of lexical acquisition, social consequences of language impairment, classroom-based preschool intervention, and language outcomes of high-risk infants.

Sara Thomas Rosen, Professor, Department of Linguistics/Dean and Associate Vice Provost of  Graduate Studies.
Dr. Rosen's primary research is in the relation among the various levels of syntactic representation.  Her current work focuses on the representation and mapping relations of the argument structure and event structure of predicates, both simplex and complex, and on the contributions of the lexicon and the phrasal syntax to semantic interpretation.  She is also interested in issues of learnability and of discerning linguistic knowledge in the acquisition of language.

Joan Sereno, Professor, Department of Linguistics.
Dr. Sereno is a psycholinguist whose research focuses on the access and representation of linguistic knowledge.  Her research examines how language is processed both at the perceptual level as well as at higher morphological and lexical levels, with a goal of relating these data to specific brain processes.  Dr. Sereno has also examined speech patterns in first language acquisition and more recently has investigated language processing in second language learners.

Holly L. Storkel, Associate Professor, Department of Speech-Language-Hearing: Sciences and Disorders.
Dr. Storkel’s research focuses on how children build a lexicon by examining the acquisition, organization, and processing of words. The primary goal is to bring converging evidence to bear on the mutual influence of phonological and lexical development in normal and clinical populations of preschool children.

Michael Vitevitch, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology.
Dr. Vitevitch is interested in the processes and representations that are used to retrieve information quickly and accurately from the lexicon.  Much of his work has examined the influence of phonological ³neighbors,² or similar sounding words, and sub-lexical information, such as phonotactic probability, on the production and comprehension of speech.

Steven F. Warren, Professor of Applied Behavior Analysis and Vice Provost for Research and Graduate Studies.
Dr. Warren is interested in early communication and language development and intervention in young children with developmental delays.  His current work is primarily focused on the effects of prelinguistic communication intervention on later language development.  He is also interested in how language develops in children with specific etiologies such as Down syndrome and Fragile X syndrome.

Emeritus Faculty

Betty Hart, Professor Emeritus.
Dr. Hart is responsible for much of the research that has been published on the effects of incidental language teaching strategies during the past 15 years.  Her current interests include both the micro‑ and macro‑analysis of the forms, social contexts, and functions of children's spontaneous speech as well as intervention and remediation in nonlaboratory settings.

Richard L. Schiefelbusch, Professor Emeritus.
Dr. Schiefelbusch has been primarily concerned with the translation of research on language acquisition and remediation into therapeutic practice.  He has been responsible for much of the conceptual work which has led to the development of the "field of language remediation" and in the design of comprehensive systems of language intervention.