Six new grants advance SHS research in health, hearing, language and literacy

Faculty in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science are launching newly funded projects that address how children hear in complex environments, how clinicians deliver swallowing rehabilitation, how early language and literacy interventions can be tailored to families and classrooms, and how educators can put statewide literacy policy into practice. These awards continue the department’s exceptional momentum in research funding, adding to a vibrant portfolio of active externally sponsored projects that advance scientific discovery and improve lives. Together, the awards reflect a shared commitment to translating innovative research into meaningful clinical and developmental outcomes.

Associate Professor Justin Aronoff is a co-investigator on “Functional Spatial Hearing in Reverberation by Pediatrically Implanted Children and Young Adults,” a project led by principal investigator Ellen Peng at Boys Town National Research Hospital. The award totals $3,353,690, with a $202,974 subaward coming to the University of Illinois.

The project focuses on children with severe-to-profound hearing loss who use bilateral cochlear implants. Although the devices partially restore spatial hearing, everyday settings such as noisy, reverberant classrooms can still make it difficult to locate sounds and separate a speaker’s voice from competing noise. Researchers will examine how room reverberation and cochlear implant signal processing work together to shape functional spatial hearing.

Using psychophysical methods and realistic simulations of reverberant spaces, the team will study auditory image perception, spatial acuity and spatial unmasking. It will also consider developmental and hearing-related factors that may influence performance. The findings are expected to clarify gaps between pediatric cochlear implant users and peers with typical hearing and inform future work on personalized bilateral fitting strategies.

Assistant Professor Mariana Mendes Bahia, Julia Carpenter and Kelly Rogers received a $9,994 Shirley Ryan AbilityLab Catalyst Grant for “Practice Patterns in Dysphagia Rehabilitation: From Characterization to Practice Improvement.” Dysphagia, or difficulty swallowing, is common among people with neurological, oncological and other conditions, but research reports and clinical documentation often provide limited detail about what treatment is delivered and how it is implemented. Carpenter and Rogers are from the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab, where Carpenter is a practice leader in SLP and Rogers is a swallowing clinician.

The team will use the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System, a framework for describing treatment targets, ingredients and mechanisms of action, to analyze dysphagia rehabilitation data. Researchers will characterize practice patterns across care settings and diagnoses, examine connections between rehabilitation practices and patient outcomes, and identify practical opportunities for quality improvement. By making treatment approaches more visible and comparable, the project aims to strengthen both clinical practice and future research.

A third project brings together Charles and Kay Stenberg Endowed Professor in Disability Research Pamela Hadley, the former SHS department head, Emily Harrington, assistant professor in Special Education and an SHS alumna, and Matt Lambert, professor and head of Special Education. Their two-year, $426,559 exploratory/developmental R21 award from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders supports “Leveraging Extant Data to Characterize Language Growth and Optimize Caregiver-Implemented Interventions for Children with Late Language Emergence.” The award runs from Aug. 1, 2026, through July 31, 2028.

Led by principal investigator Harrington, the researchers will analyze existing data from a randomized controlled trial of Enhanced Milieu Teaching-Sentence Focused, a caregiver-implemented intervention. They will trace vocabulary growth from 30 to 39 months and sentence development from 36 to 45 months, while examining how intervention strategies, children’s uptake of those strategies and participant-level factors shaped individual trajectories.

Results will help identify which intervention components work best at different developmental points. That evidence can guide the design and evaluation of brief, targeted approaches capable of reaching more children with late language emergence and their families.

SHS Associate Professor Laura Mattie’s research proposal, “Using Developmental Machine Learning to Code Eye Gaze in Down Syndrome and Fragile X Syndrome,” was selected for an 18-month, $29,987 grant from the Center for Social and Behavioral Science.

Mattie’s project tackles a barrier in caring for children with neurodevelopmental disabilities: recognizing communication before speech. For children with Down syndrome and fragile X syndrome, gaze patterns differ from those of typically developing children and children with autism, making behavioral coding slow. Laura and her collaborators will extend Gaze_LLE to these understudied populations and authentic mother-child play, combining expertise to train AI to detect single, dual, and triadic gaze shifts. The team will compare predictions with human coders, examine accuracy across diagnoses and developmental levels, and establish safeguards for video data. A stronger study will describe participant ages, longitudinal versus cross-sectional samples, naturalistic versus structured recordings, annotation requirements, training procedures, and data needs. If successful, the tool will free clinicians and trainees to focus on interpreting communication, supporting diagnosis and treatment planning. Ultimately, efficient repeated measurement could transform progress monitoring during intervention and help families see developmental change sooner.

Assistant Professor Meaghan McKenna is principal investigator for “Writing for Reading: A Technology-Based Approach to Literacy Growth,” a $1,876,852 project funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs through its Stepping-Up Technology Implementation program. Hope Gerde of Texas A&M University is co-principal investigator; Jack Drobisz of the University of South Florida and Pasquale Bottalico are co-investigators. The award runs from Oct. 1, 2026, through Sept. 30, 2031.

The team will add a kindergarten-first grade writing extension to the Electronic Data Management and Expert Decision Making System. Through iterative development, evaluation, scale-up and dissemination, the project will offer job-embedded professional development designed to help classroom teachers strengthen children’s writing and reading achievement.

McKenna also serves as co-principal investigator on “The Illinois Literacy Plan: Identifying the Supports Needed for Meaningful Policy Implementation and Revision,” led by principal investigator Rachel Schachter of the University of Illinois Chicago. The $15,000 grant from the University of Illinois System Institute of Government and Public Affairs runs from July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2027.

The project will assess how school administrators, teachers and specialists perceive the Illinois State Literacy Plan and what support they need to implement it effectively. Findings will guide policies that better support educators and strengthen partnerships across the state.

Each project also depends on collaboration across disciplines and institutions, extending the faculty’s expertise through partnerships that connect laboratory measures, clinical records, classroom practice, public policy and family-centered intervention data with the practical challenges experienced by patients, practitioners, educators, children and caregivers every day.

Across the six awards, faculty and collaborators are pairing rigorous methods with questions rooted in daily life: hearing in a classroom, documenting swallowing care, supporting a child’s first words and sentences, strengthening early writing and reading, and helping educators implement literacy policy. These new projects continue a period of remarkable research growth within the department, adding to SHS’ mission of advancing both scientific discovery and clinical practice.

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