Communication Sciences Research Center
The Communication Science Research Center is a joint venture between Patient Services, Otolaryngology, Audiology, and Speech Pathology at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. The center’s goal is to advance the fundamental understanding of speech, spoken and written language, and hearing and to translate this understanding into innovative diagnostics, instrumentation and interventions.
Hearing Research
Hearing underpins the development of language and communication. Our general aim is to examine how hearing in children changes over the first 12 years of life and how hearing impairments affect the typical development of this crucial sense.
Andrew Dimitrijevic is examining how the auditory cortex of the brain responds to speech and speech-like sounds in children with profound deafness who use cochlear implants. He is also working with Lisa Hunter and David Moore to ask how the rapid coding of sounds in the ear and brainstem is affected by listening difficulties of the kind that may underpin a wide range of learning disorders including language impairment, attention deficit disorder, dyslexia and autism. David Moore is doing additional tests of hearing on these children to ask how speech hearing in challenging environments may contribute to their difficulties.
Reading Research
Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus is studying how the brain processes underlying reading go wrong in children with reading and literacy problems. She is also conducting community studies of reading to build awareness of the need for parents to read to their children. A training program was developed to accelerate poor reading. The effectiveness of that training is being assessed in large samples of children through school-based programs, with additional lab work to study the brain processes involved.
