Speech Development Laboratory

The Speech Development Lab at the University of Florida is interested in how children acquire the abilities to recognize the phonetic-level structure of their native language and to produce speech with the gestural organization typical of their native language; what role the ability to recognize that structure plays in language processing; what conditions of childhood support the development of these skills; and precisely how perceptual processing of the speech signal is affected by conditions such as poverty, frequent severe ear infections, and hearing loss.