The BNCD Center is comprised of 15 affiliated research projects, with 12 individual investigators, 10 of whom are funded by NIDCD, 2 from NICHD, 2 from NIA, and 1 from NIDCR, with a current year funding level of $3,019,989. The individual research projects involve studies of symptoms, etiology, diagnosis of and intervention with language impairments in children, sensor motor aspects of speech production in infants and children, speech and lexical representations in children and adults, age-related communicative decline in elderly adults, infant visual neuroperceptual development as a predictor of later cognitive development, and cochlear functioning of the auditory system. Disease entities include speech and language impairments and associated reading difficulties of children and adults; mental retardation; autism; cleft palate; sensor motor impairments to infant or facial mechanisms; hearing loss; aging; and dementia. Outcomes of the investigators' research programs include an identified clinical grammatical marker of SLI with a newly published standardized assessment instrument for clinical uses; a device for measuring infant's or or facial sensor motor functioning; an identified infant attention marker as a predictor of developmental cognitive risk; an identified clinical linguistic marker of dementia/Alzheimer disease; a model of cochlear pathology with direct links to hearing aid design; and a model of possible cochlear neuroregenerative processes with implications for biointervention in hearing disease. The Center provides support for current and future research, and new collaborative research, via an Administrative Core with specialized information retrieval and dissemination services, and three research cores: Advanced Statistical Methods (ASC), Participant Services (PARC), and Digital and Electrical Engineering (DEEC).
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