March 24, 2008 (Vol. 7, No. 5)

Professor Awarded Grant to Study Language Disorder

Professor Liat Seiger-Gardner

Children with a disorder known as Specific Language Impairment (SLI) make a lot of mistakes when they talk because they have trouble finding words. They also have trouble repeating nonsense words and recalling lists of real words. If they're not helped, they'll often avoid communication altogether, which leaves them at risk for social problems.

Professor Liat Seiger-Gardner (Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences) hopes to learn more about preschool children with SLI through a $10,000 New Century Scholars Research Grant she received from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation. Graduate students Olidia Valencia and Christine Newmayer will assist in the study of five- to seven-year-olds, which is expected to last for one year. It will include twenty preschool children with SLI and twenty typically developing preschool children.

Understanding how children with SLI process speech sounds in real time is key to devising effective programs that will help ease the disorder. The study will rely on an experiment Professor Seiger-Gardner developed with E-Prime software, which simulates a one-on-one conversation with each child and requires them to quickly look, listen, and speak—skill that typically developing children take for granted. Because children with SLI are believed to process speech differently, they are often at a loss for words.

The experiment requires each child to quickly name pictures displayed on a computer. The child must complete this task while listening to words, called "distractors," on headphones. By measuring the time each child takes to identify each picture and varying the timing and characteristics of each distractor word, Professor Seiger-Gardner can quantify the impact of different distractor words on speech production in children with SLI, and potentially discover clues to the mystery of how they process speech.

Professor Seiger-Gardner has already conducted an identical experiment on eight- to ten-year-old children with SLI. In a paper that will be published soon in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, she presents the data from that experiment, which suggests differences in speech processing between older children with SLI and their typically developing peers.

Professor Seiger-Gardner has taught at Lehman since 2005 and previously taught speech pathology at Queens College on an adjunct basis. A native of Israel, she received a B.A. from Tel Aviv University, an M.A. from Queens College, and M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from the CUNY Graduate Center.

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