Language Study Recruitment at HESP Seeks Children 2-3 Years Old

My name is Ning Hsu, I'm the project manager of the Language Fluency Lab at the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences. We are currently recruiting child participants for a longitudinal study and we'd like to reach out to our university community to share this information. 

We are currently recruiting three groups of children – who are 2 or 3 years old: 

• Children who have started to stutter within the past year.

• Children who were late to start talking. These children usually have fewer than 50 words total or no two-word combinations at 24 months. Unfortunately, we are unable to enroll children with other developmental disabilities such as cognitive delays or suspected autism. 
• English monolingual children, who have mothers native speakers of English, and no concerns about their language development or any other development concerns.

Participation requires one visit per year to our office (located in LeFrak Hall) for three years. Children receive extensive developmental evaluations at no charge, and parents are provided with a written report documenting their child’s performance. Although our assessments follow a research protocol and are not individualized speech-language assessments, many of the tasks involved are those used in developmental evaluations. For each visit, families also receive monetary compensation and a small toy for the child. 

The project is funded by federal grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation awarded to Dr. Nan Bernstein Ratner, Ed. D., CCC-SLP, a Board-Certified Specialist in Child Language and Child Language Disorders, at the University of Maryland, and a co-investigator at Carnegie-Mellon University. 

If you would like any additional information, please contact our team at languagefluencylab@umd.edu or Dr. Ratner at nratner@umd.edu. Thank you!