I am Chair of the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, and immediate Past-Chair of the University Senate. I helped found the UMD Infant & Child Studies Consortium  and the University of Maryland Autism Research Consortium.  I am also a member of the Center for the Comparative & Evolutionary Biology of Hearing and the Maryland Language Science Center. Within NACS, I regularly teach the Research Ethics course, and have previously served as the Director of Graduate Studies and chair of the admissions committee.   In 2013, I was honored with the BSOS Outstanding Graduate Advisor award, and in 2020/2021 as a University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher. My research focuses on speech perception and language acquisition. More specifically, I am interested in how the brain recognizes words from fluent speech, especially in the context of noise, and how this ability changes with development.   For more information on my research, please download my public-oriented research statement.

Although my lab focuses on adult and toddler speech perception, we also do work on attention/distractability, the impact of concussions on language, and dogs' ability to recognize and respond to human language.  For more information, visit the websites for our labs: The Language Development & Perception Lab,  the Brain Injury & Language Development Lab, and the Canine Language Perception Lab.

Degrees

  • PhD

I regularly teach the NACS research ethics course.

My research focuses on speech perception and language acquisition. More specifically, I am interested in how the brain recognizes and learns words from fluent speech, especially in the context of noise, and how this ability changes with development. Recent research has examined topics such as: 1) infants' ability to recognize their name in the context of noise or poor signal quality;  2) how information from one stream of speech can influence the perceptual processing of an alternate stream of speech;  3) the effect of noise or signal degradation on children's ability to learn new words; 4) the effects of lexical neighbors on children's and adult's word naming, both those who are typically developing and those who have word-finding difficulties or who stutter 5) whether infant perceptual abilities and parental input predict later language development; 6) children's ability to comprehend degraded speech, such as that produced by a cochlear-implant; 7) the effect of sports-related concussions on children's language processing.  Current and recent grants focus on 1) the potential contributing roles of speech segmentation, statistical learning, and parental input in children's language acquisition, 2) how bilingual exposure during infancy affects the ability to attend to speech in noise, 3) children's ability to combine information from multiple sources (including effects of prior knowledge) 4) the ability of young children diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to understand speech in noise, and 5) early perceptual differences between children at risk for an ASD diagnosis and those not at risk. We are also working to develop a new software system for testing young infants in listening studies, and have begun testing our canine companions' abilities to understand human language.

You can download my public-oriented research statement here.

Research Methods
Behavioral experiments
Eye tracking
Language acquisition
Infancy/ Early Childhood
Animal behavior
Research Interests
Language
Cognitive Development
Cognition
Traumatic Brain Injury
Cochlear implants
Auditory streaming

I am Chair of the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, and Chair of the University Senate, as well as Associate Director of the Maryland Language Science Center.  Within NACS, I have searched as the Director of Graduate Studies and chair of the admissions committee, as well as serving on the curriculum and executive committees.

  • Campus
    Service
    Chair, Dept. of Hearing & Speech Sciences
  • Campus
    Service
    Past-Chair, UMD Senate

Current Students

Former Students

  • Student Name
    Chris Heffner
    Current Position
    Asst. Professor, University of Buffalo
  • Student Name
    Amritha Mallikarjun
    Current Position
    Postdoc Affiliate, Penn State Working Dog Lab
  • Student Name
    Giovanna Morini
    Current Position
    Assistant Professor, University of Delaware
  • Student Name
    Melissa Stockbridge
    Current Position
    Researcher, Johns Hopkins
  • Student Name
    Brittany Jaekel
    Current Position
    Research Scientist, Starkey Hearing
Dr. Rochelle Newman
0100 LeFrak Hall
Neuroscience and Cognitive Science
Email
rnewman1 [at] umd.edu