Our Goals

Developmental language disorder (DLD) affects at least 7% of kindergarten aged children. In the “Language in Motion” lab we study how children with DLD, with speech sound disorder (SSD), and with typical development learn. We have discovered that children with DLD show difficulties not only in language but also in motor skill. We hypothesize that shared aspects of cognition that incorporate sequences affect sound pattern learning, grammatical learning, and also aspects of motor learning. In the language domain, one present focus is on how children learn different types of sound pattern sequences in nonwords and words. We are also studying rhythmic grouping in prosody. In the motor domain, we are currently focused on how children learn novel signs and how they produce musical sequences and manual button press sequences in a serial reaction time task. Our long-term goal is to identify children with DLD earlier and more accurately and to develop new and more effective interventions for these children.

Who We Are

Our lab is made up of scientists, clinicians and students who work together to learn about language, speech, and motor abilities in children with DLD, SSD, and typical development.

What Children Do When They Visit Our Lab?

The children who come to our lab are junior scientists who help us learn about their speech, language, and motor development. The child in this photo is participating in one of our language and speech production experiments. She is set up with sensors so that we can track her speech movements while she says words and sentences. Other examples of current experiments are about sign language, hand pattern, and music production. Children also engage in assessment tasks in language, speech, hearing, nonverbal problem solving, and gross and fine motor skill. Over 500 young children have been junior scientists in our lab and have helped us discover how children learn language. 

Research News

Here are some highlights from our new work from 2023.

• We have learned that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulty producing novel signs accurately. New words learned with the hands show similar phonological (sound/sign pattern) deficits to those learned in spoken language. In the sign domain, errors are observed in the features of hand shape, movement path, and hand orientation. Children with DLD also show increased motor variability in their hands when they are producing novel signs that require bimanual and coordinated movement sequences (Goffman, Factor, Barna, Cai, & Feld, 2023).   
• We have also learned that children with DLD show less accurate and more variable production of simple musical sequences than their typically developing peers. These results support domain general deficits in sequential aspects of production (Kreidler, Vuolo, & Goffman, in press).
• We have enjoyed collaborating with Alan Wisler at Utah State University and Jun Wang at University of Texas-Austin. We have developed new methods for studying speech motion variability that do not depend on expensive equipment but that use simple acoustic recordings of speech (Benham, Wisler, Wang, & Goffman, 2023). 
• We have work under review in which we lay out our developmental account of how infants, children, and adults learn sound patterns that do or do not include sequential dependencies. Infants and young children show surprising learning skills that adults do not. We argue that DLD is a disorder in the ability to detect and deploy sequential dependencies over multiple domains (Goffman & Gerken, under review).