Welcome to the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences

Our goal is to improve speech, language, and hearing.

Our award-winning faculty achieve this through:

• Research innovation
• Clinical Services
• Community outreach
• Training the next generation of clinicians and researchers

And through active collaborations across the campus.

Undergraduate Spotlight: 2016 Summer Research Interns

This summer, undergraduate students became involved in on-campus research in the HESP department. With faculty mentors including Dr. Rochelle Newman, Dr. Jared Novick, and Dr. Yi Ting Huang, these students gained hands-on experience in labs working on studies that could have real-life, clinical implications.

HESP Seminar Series: Dr. Li Sheng, University of Delaware

On Wednesday, September 28th, Dr. Li Sheng will present a talk as part of the HESP Seminar Series. Her talk, "Profiles of language impairment: Insights from speakers of Mandarin Chinese," will be given in LeFrak Room 2208 from 12:00PM- 1:00PM. All are welcome attend!

Click here to see the schedule for this semester's HESP Seminar Series.

Research Spotlight: Dr. Nan Bernstein Ratner receives NIH and NSF grants for fluency projects

Dr. Nan Bernstein Ratner and her colleague Brian MacWhinney (Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University) have just received two major funded grants! A grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the project titled: A shared database for the study of the development of language fluency will fund the development of an online fluency database as part of the TalkBank initiative (www.talkbank.org).

New Teen Social Skills Group at UMD!

The Hearing and Speech Department and UMARC are excited to announce that this summer, the UMD Hearing & Speech Clinic became an official PEERS® (Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills) certified location. This is an evidence-based social skills training program for high school students with high functioning autism and their parents. To learn more, visit the new section of our site: https://hesp.umd.edu/clinic/landingtopic/peers-program-teens , or email Kathy Dow-Burger at kdowburg@umd.edu.

Clinic Spotlight: Holding on to Hearing at Any Age

Elizabeth Schmidt was two months old when the Titanic sank in 1912. Now, more than 104 years later, she’s outlived every passenger who escaped the sunken ship. She speaks slowly but in a clear voice, can still walk with the aid of a walker and changes her hearing aid batteries—roughly half the size of a dime—without any assistance. And for the last 26 years, she’s visited the University of Maryland Hearing and Speech Clinic annually for a check-up.