The Clinical Research Center for Communicative Disorders in Children (Center), comprising investigators from several medical and scientific disciplines, was established three years ago. The Center's purpose is to develop new knowledge to improve the detection, treatment and prevention of communication disorders in children. These studies are carried out through the Core and six interrelated projects, utilizing behavioral and electrophysiologic techniques to examine the ontogeny of auditory language functions in normal and high-risk infants and children. The Core is responsible for recruiting and maintaining the study cohort; pediatric, otolaryngologic, neurodevelopmental, audiologic, linguistic and cognitive assessment; data processing; statistical design and analysis, and the overall administration of the projects. Project I will study the developmental changes in sound pressure transformation of the external ear in infants and children. Project II will determine the relationship between behavioral audiometry and frequency-specific auditory brainstem responses in normal-hearing infants and young children, and in infants and children with conductive or cochlear hearing loss. Project III will prospectively relate early auditory discrimination learning capacities to the development of normal and abnormal language. Project IV will develop and validate electrophysiological methods to detect auditory discriminative processing deficits in young infants which may contribute to impaired speech and language. Project V will determine the electrophysiological characteristics of hearing and language dysfunction throughout the auditory system and will evaluate the electrophysiological effects or different stimulus manipulations in children with these deficits. Project VI will utilize topographical analysis of event-related potentials to delineate the developmental electrophysiological correlates of linguistic processing in normal young children and those with developmental language disorders. The Center serves as a multidisciplinary resource for continuing research and education in the area of the communication disorders of children at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and its affiliated institutions.
