My major career objective is to establish and maintain an active inter- disciplinary research program concerned with issues in cognitive, linguistic, and neurological development. My research has three primary aims: 1) to describe in detail developmental trajectories of normal and abnormal language development from pre-linguistic intentional com- munication through the establishment of complex syntax, 2) to identify early predictors of risk for language disorders and learning dis- abilities, and 3) to describe the relationships between the development of language and nonlinguistic cognition and the development of the neural mechanisms that support them. l am already engaged in research dedicated to the first two aims, and l have done some preliminary work in the third area. The coursework, clinical, and laboratory rotations neurology, neurosciences, and neural network modeling proposed in this RCDA are to provide needed fluency in those fields so that I can formulate well constructed hypotheses and research designs founded solidly in the neurosciences as well as developmental psycholinguistics. The training that I receive through the RCDA will help the planned departmental transition to stronger training in neurologic foundations of communicative disorders, and establish the kind of interdisciplinary training for our students that will be essential to adequate training of speech-language pathologists in the next century. I have office and laboratory space configured specifically for my research needs, and I will be able to retain adequate space should I receive the RCDA. The goals of funded research project (Project 1 of P01# DC01289) are to achieve an understanding of the linguistic and non-linguistic factors that are associated with persistent deficits or successful recovery from initial language delay in children in the bottom tenth percentile for expressive vocabulary at 18 to 24 months of age, to coordinate the behavioral profiles with electrophysiological studies of the same children (Project 5), to determine whether and to what extent changes in linguistic and non-linguistic ability in late talkers can be linked to specific changes in brain organization for language, and to compare results from late-talkers with the cross-domain profiles and developmental trajectories displayed by children with focal brain injury (Project 2), Down syndrome and Williams syndrome (Project 3), and prenatal exposure to cocaine (Project 4).
