Centers & Labs
Faculty Labs
Child Language Intervention Lab (CLIL)
The CLIL is directed by Lizbeth H. Finestack, Ph.D., CCC-SLP. The CLIL aims to identify efficient and effective language interventions and to improve assessment approaches for children and adolescents with language impairment. The CLIL focuses on children with developmental language disorder; children with neurodevelopmental disorders, such as Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome, or autism spectrum disorder; and bilingual children. CLIL is focused on developing new child language intervention techniques, understanding the language profiles of children and adolescents with different neurodevelopmental disorders, improving assessment techniques for bilingual children, and identifying sensitive outcome measures to use in clinical trials. The CLIL welcomes students at all levels (highschool, undergraduate, and graduate students!) to support its research endeavors. Please email Dr. Finestack (finestack@umn.edu) if you are interested in becoming involved.
Child Language Disorders Across Diverse Contexts Lab
The Child Language Disorders Across Diverse Contexts (CLDC) lab seeks to improve assessment and treatment services for children with developmental language disorders across monolingual and bilingual populations. We study underlying factors that affect language learning, such as cognitive processing skills, and those that affect the efficacy of clinical services, such as clinician-client relationships.
Consortium for Pediatric Aerodigestive Advancement (CPAA)
The Consortium for Pediatric Aerodigestive Advancement (CPAA) is a clinical research team composed of expert clinicians and researchers from 13 leading children’s hospitals. The team unites in a shared mission to conduct high quality research surrounding clinically relevant questions. Lead by Dr. Katlyn McGrattan, the team executes these investigations in a 550 square foot scientific home equipped with a specialized data collection pod, analysis stations, and a team collaboration room. Within this collaborative space consortium members partake in quarterly web conference calls to strategize plans and provide team updates, with weekly site meetings for local site activity discussion, student oversight, and mentorship.
Studies in the Applied Sociolinguistics of Speech and Language (SASS Lab)
Listen Lab
The Listen Lab is directed by Dr. Matthew Winn. The lab works to understand speech communication and what makes it difficult for people who have hearing loss. It focuses on measuring listening effort during speech perception, and the ways that effort can offer insight that is not provided by standard clinical measures. The lab also focuses in speech processing in the auditory system and the ways that listeners incorporate multiple sources of information when perceiving words and identifying different talkers.
Learn more about the Listen Lab
Schlauch Hearing Laboratory
Professor Schlauch’s laboratory addresses a wide range of topics, including auditory attention, loudness, speech perception, and diagnostic audiology. His goal is to improve the precision of audiologic diagnostic tests and to understand the perceptual consequences of hearing loss. Professor Schlauch enjoys introducing students to research and the publication process.
Learn more about the Schlauch Hearing Laboratory
Speech Fluency Lab
The speech fluency lab is directed by Dr. Jayanthi Sasisekaran. Research activities in the fluency lab are designed to examine psycholinguistic and sensorimotor processes in children and adults who stutter. Students interested in working and/or volunteering in the lab are requested to contact Dr. Sasisekaran.
Learn more about the Speech Fluency Lab
Zhang Lab
The overall goal of research in the Zhang Lab is to characterize brain plasticity across the life span and to define what the neural signature markers are for normal and pathological development of speech and language. Three lines of speech-language-hearing research are represented, namely, developmental, cross-linguistic, and pathological.
Learn more about the Zhang Lab
Centers & Collaborative Groups
University of Minnesota Interdisciplinary Groups
Our faculty and students are also active in interdisciplinary groups across campus. Among these departments are Biomedical Engineering, Dentistry, Psychology, Special Education, outside corporations, and others. Below are some groups SLHS students have been involved in:
Auditory Perception & Neuroscience
This group provides an opportunity to facilitate collaborations and the sharing of knowledge among hearing researchers at the University of Minnesota and the greater research community. The group’s interests focus on the understanding of the perceptual mechanisms underlying normal and impaired auditory systems. Current study methods involve the use of animal and human subjects to obtain physiological measures (evoked auditory surface potentials, neural imaging, and neurophysiology) and behavioral measures of simple and complex sounds, including speech and music.
Learn more about the Auditory Perception & Neuroscience group.
Hearing Loss in Children
The main focus of the Hearing Loss in Children: Diagnosis, Etiology and Outcomes group is in advancing research and care related to hearing loss in children.
Learn more about the Hearing Loss in Children: Diagnosis, Etiology and Outcomes group.
Language & Cognition
This group provides a structure for bringing together and facilitating collaboration among students and faculty with a common interest in addressing theoretical and practical questions that arise at the interface between language and other cognitive systems, and whose answers require a deeper understanding of the neurocognitive basis of linguistic communication.
Learn more about the Language & Cognition group.
Rehabilitation Research Graduate Group
The mission of this group is the cultivation of premiere scientists and future academicians to lead the transformation of the science and practice of rehabilitation. The Interdisciplinary Rehabilitation Research Graduate Group includes faculty, graduate students, and clinical, translational, and basic scientists at the University of Minnesota and other institutions in Minnesota interested in advancing the discovery, dissemination, and clinical translation of scientific findings in Rehabilitation. We conduct a broad range of rehabilitation research, from basic science to clinical studies.
Learn more about the Rehabilitation Research Graduate Group.
Center for Applied and Translational Sensory Science (CATSS)
The vision of CATSS is to harness the University of Minnesota's world-leading scientific expertise in sensory science to tackle the problems faced by millions of people with sensory deficiencies, such as low vision or hearing loss. With our aging population, sensory deficiencies that cut people off from their social and physical environment will have an increasingly devastating impact at both the individual and societal levels.
Julia M. Davis Speech-Language-Hearing Center
The Julia M. Davis Speech-Language-Hearing Center offers a broad range of services for individuals with impairments of speech, language, and hearing. The services offered in our clinic provide clinical education opportunities for graduate students. All services are provided by graduate students under the supervision of a nationally certified and licensed speech-language pathologist or audiologist. The center provides clinical services, some of which interface with ongoing faculty research with consenting research participants.