Language Intervention Lab

Welcome to the Language Intervention Laboratory

Many children have difficulty acquiring skills in nonverbal communication, speech, and language. These difficulties negatively impact these children’s social, behavioral, emotional, and academic performance. Speech and language interventions are developed to help these children to communicate and to minimize the problems they have in other life functions. Whether the interventions accomplish these objectives must be determined through research.

The Language Intervention Laboratory is a state-of-the art facility for planning, implementing, and producing scholarly works on studies of the effects, efficacy, and effectiveness of speech and language intervention for young children. It is housed in the Smith West building on the campus of the University of Kansas Medical Center. The laboratory is closely affiliated with the Department of Hearing and Speech at KUMC, the KU Intercampus Program in Communicative Disorders, the Kansas Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (KIDDRC), the Center for Biobehavioral Neurosciences in Communication Disorders (BNCD), and the Schiefelbusch Life Span Institute at the University of Kansas-Lawrence.

Our affiliation with the KIDDRC, sponsored by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (NICHD, HD02528), supplies us with the support of numerous research “cores,” particularly in the areas of grant management, statistical consultation, computer technology, and graphic design. Our projects have been funded by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) in the US Department of Education and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD).

As well as serving as the context for studies on the effects of speech and language intervention, the Language Intervention Laboratory serves as a training ground for students working to become evidence-based speech-language pathologists and clinical researchers in speech-language pathology. These students are engaged in all aspects of the laboratory’s functions including the planning of investigations and grant preparation, assessment of potential research participants, computerized analyses of assessment results, provision of clinical services, statistical analysis of results, and preparation of scholarly articles and book chapters. All work in the laboratory complies with the policies on protection of human subjects of the Human Subjects Committee at KUMC.