Dr. Nan Bernstein Ratner and her colleague Brian MacWhinney (Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University) have just received two major funded grants! A grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the project titled: A shared database for the study of the development of language fluency will fund the development of an online fluency database as part of the TalkBank initiative (www.talkbank.org). TalkBank is a website containing databases for the collaborative study of typical and disordered human communication.

The second grant that Dr. Bernstein Ratner and Brian MacWhinney have received is from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a project titled: The development of language fluency across childhood. This research project will investigate how language ability, aspects of utterance construction and speech rate interact in young children to predict fluency profiles. It will intersect with the NIH grant, with which it has partial overlap, but focus on how typically developing children learn how to produce fluent speech.

Dr. Bernstein Ratner will also serve as a consultant to a third major federal grant, also from the NIH. Her support has been awarded for the project titled: Neural markers of persistence and recovery from childhood stuttering: An fMRI study of continuous speech production. This project will attempt to specify linguistic and brain imaging markers that may assist researchers and clinicians in identifying those children with greater needs for early intervention to prevent life-long handicap from persistent stuttering.

To learn more about Dr. Bernstein Ratner's grants please click here.