Dr. Bernstein Ratner is an applied developmental psycholinguist whose research primarily centers on typical and disordered child speech/language development, and fluency disorder (with an emphasis on stuttering) across the lifespan. Among the specific populations she investigates are late talking children, children with Specific Language Impairment, seizure disorder (epilepsy), intellectual impairment and autism. A complementary theme across these populations is investigation of the role that parental input and interaction play in children’s communicative development. She studies development in both monolingual and bilingual populations.

Dr. Bernstein Ratner’s primary research approach is computational analysis of spoken and written language , using TalkBank utilities; she is currently working on an initiative with colleague Brian MacWhinney at Carnegie Mellon University to redevelop clinical norms for measures of child language ability, using the thousands of records of children’s spoken language held in TalkBank. Together with colleague Rochelle Newman, she conducted a large-scale longitudinal study of children’s language development in the first two years of life. Among other current collaborators  Ho Ming Chow at the University of Delaware, and J. Scott Yaruss at Michigan State University, with whom she studies language processing in people who stutter, and predictors of recovery from early stuttering. She was previously a consultant to Dr. Erika Hoff’s study on language acquisition in Spanish-English bilingual preschool children, with colleagues at GWU (Cynthia Core and Shelley Brundage).

With Brian MacWhinney of Carnegie-Mellon University, Dr. Bernstein Ratner manages FluencyBank, a project of TalkBank (https://fluency.talkbank.org/). This initiative has been funded by the NIDCD and NSF (Linguistics) to track fluency development in typical children, those who stutter, late-talking children and children raised bilingually. In addition, FluencyBank seeks to archive and facilitate sharing of data relevant to fluency research.

Also with Professor MacWhinney, Dr. Bernstein Ratner had a grant from NIDCD through 2025 to examine current recommendations for child language sample analysis in clinical settings, renorm the most typically used measures for clinical assessment of children's language, and develop dialect-sensitive measures for the identification and appropriate assessment of children who speak non-mainstream American English. A current extension of that grant through 2028, also funded by NIDCD through the TALK initiative (Tackling Acquisition of Language in Kids) is examining written language development in students from Grades 6-12 from a wide variety of SES and educational backgrounds.

Among Dr. Bernstein Ratner’s recognition for contributions in these areas of study are the Honors of the American Speech-Language and Hearing Association (ASHA) and Maryland Speech-Language Hearing Association (MSHA), Fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Distinguished Researcher Award from the International Fluency Association, the Miegunyah Distinguished Fellowship, University of Melbourne, and a Distinguished Alumna award from Temple University. In 2016, Dr. Bernstein Ratner was named Professional of the Year by the National Stuttering Association.

Please contact her directly by email if you are interested in graduate study at UMD, at nratner@umd.edu