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Child Language Doctoral Program


Mabel L. Rice, Ph.D.


The Fred and Virginia Merrill Distinguished Professor of Advanced Studies

Electronically published journal article in the Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders: "Convergent genetic linkage and associations to language, speech and reading measures in families of probands with Specific Language Impairment"
August 26, 2009

Electronically published journal article (will be available in PubMed after publication in JSHLR): "Judgments of Omitted BE and DO in Questions as Extended Finiteness Clinical Markers of SLI to Fifteen Years: A Study of Growth and Asymptote". (NIHMSID # 111778)
April 14, 2009

Electronically published article and podcast from TheBody.com website:
Kids Who Grow Up With HIV May Be More Likely to Have Language Impairment, Study Suggests
There's precious little research on the long-term health of children who were infected with HIV when they were born. But as HIV meds allow these kids to live longer and longer, we're beginning to learn more about how HIV or HIV meds might affect them as they grow older. A recent study by Mabel Rice, Ph.D. suggests that children in the U.S. who were born with HIV may, years later, be more likely to have language development problems than children who are born without HIV.
CLICK HERE
for Article and podcast

February 11, 2009

Electronically published entry in the Encyclopedia of Language and Literacy Development: "The Causal Effects of Genes on Language Disorders Across Clinical Conditions",
July 2, 2008

Article in The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Researchers Gain Understanding of How Poverty Alters the Brain",
February 29, 2008

Related article: Zubrick, S.R., Taylor, C.L., Rice, M. L., and Slegers, D.W. (2007) Late Language Emergence at 24 Months: An Epidemiological Study of Prevalence, Predictors, and Covariates. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Vol. 50, 1562–1592. (full-text article)

Link to New York Times Sunday Magazine article of February 24, 2008, on Child Language Development in which Dr. Rice is quoted: (click here)


Awards:

  • Honors, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in recognition of career research accomplishments
  • Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
  • Fellow, American Psychological Association

Mabel L. Rice is an international authority on language disorders in children and the genetics of language acquisition. She directs three programs in the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies and maintains an active research lab, carrying out collaborative studies at international levels. She is best known for her research on Specific Language Impairment.

At the University of Kansas, Mabel L. Rice directs:

Research Interests:

Mabel L. Rice is an international authority on language disorders in children and the genetics of language acquisition. In 2001, she was a Japan Society Fellow. In 2000, she was recognized as a Haydn Williams Fellow in Australia. She has been a visiting scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science at MIT, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Institut fur Linguistik at the University of Potsdam in Germany, and the Hopital de la Salpetriere in Paris. She is the former editor of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. At the University of Kansas, she directs the Child Language Doctoral Program, one of the first interdisciplinary programs in the country to train child-language specialists. She also directs the Merrill Advanced Studies Center and the Biobehavioral Neurosciences in Communications Disorders Center. She maintains an active research lab where students address fundamental questions about young children's language acquisition and language impairments.

With Ken Wexler from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she developed the first test to successfully diagnose Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in children ages 3 to 8. The Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment was released by the Psychological Corporation in 2001 and is being used by school districts and speech language professionals. Dr. Rice has investigated the disorder SLI and other language impairments with research funding from the National Institutes of Health. Currently, she directs a longitudinal study of a grammatical marker in children with SLI and their family members. This study includes a subcontract for genetics analyses with Shelley Smith at the University of Nebraska Medical Center - Omaha. She collaborates with Rebecca Landa of Johns Hopkins University in a study of children with autism. She also leads a collaborative team with investigators Steve Zubrick and Kate Taylor at Curtin University in Perth Australia, in a large-scale study of the language acquisition of twins compared to single-born children, and their families.

Read an interview with Dr. Rice about her work, and the language disorder she helped define in the Kansas Alumni Magazine.

Developmental Language Disorders -- a book edited by Mabel Rice and Steven Warren -- is now available from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Selected Publications

Articles:

Mabel L. Rice, Shelley D. Smith & Javier Gayán (2009). Convergent genetic linkage and associations to language, speech and reading measures in families of probands with Specific Language Impairment. Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders.

Paradis, J., Rice, M.L., Crago, M. & Marquis, J. (2008) The acquisition of tense in English: Distinguishing child second language from first language and specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 689-722. NIHMSID # 56920

Rice, M.L., Taylor, C., & Zubrick, S. (2008). Language Outcomes of 7-Year-Old Children With or Without a History of Late Language Emergence at 24 Months. Journal of Speech, Language, & Hearing Research. 51:394–407.

Zubrick, S., Taylor, C., Rice, M.L. & Slegers, D. (2007). Late language emergence at 24 months: An epidemiological study of prevalence and covariates. Journal of Speech, Language, & Hearing Research. 50:1562-1592.

Rice, M.L., Redmond, S.M., Hoffman, L. (2006). MLU in children with SLI and younger control children shows concurrent validity, stable and parallel growth trajectories. Journal of Speech, Language, & Hearing Research, 49, 793-808

Rice, M. L., Warren, S. F., & Betz, S. (2005). Language symptoms of developmental language disorders: An overview of autism, Down syndrome, fragile X, specific language impairment, and Williams syndrome. Applied Psycholinguistics, 26, 7-28.

Rice, M. L., Tomblin, J. B., Hoffman, L, Richman, W. A., & Marquis, J. (2004). Grammatical tense deficits in children with SLI and nonspecific language impairment: Relationships with nonverbal IQ over time. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47, 816-834.

Rice, M. L., Wexler, K., & Redmond, S. M. (1999). Grammaticality judgments of an extended optional infinitive grammar: Evidence from English-speaking children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 42, 943-961.

Rice, M. L., Wexler, K., & Hershberger, S. (1998). Tense over time: The longitudinal course of tense acquisition in children with specific language impairments. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 41, 1412-1431.

Chapters:

Rice, M. L. (2009). Language Acquisition Lessons from Children with Specific Language Impairment: Revisiting the Discovery of Latent Structures. In V. C. M. Gathercole (Ed.), Routes to Language: Studies in Honor of Melissa Bowerman (pp. 287-313). New York, London: Taylor & Francis Group.

Rice, M.L. & Smolik, F. (2007). Genetics of language disorders: Clinical conditions, phenotypes, and genes. In Gaskell, G. (Ed.) Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics. (pp. 685-702). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Rice, M.L. (2007). Children with Specific Language Impairment: Bridging the Genetic and Developmental Perspectives. In E. Hoff and M. Shatz (Eds), Handbook of Language Development, Blackwell Publishers, pp. 411-431.

For a complete listing of Dr. Rice's publications, click here.

Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment is now available for speech language professionals and teachers through Harcourt Assessment, Inc. To place an order, search under rice/wexler in the online catalogue, or call 1-800-211-8378.   /   ERRATA from the answer form and manual.