HESP Faculty member, Dr. Nan Ratner, has been awarded an NIH research grant to reduce bias and improve diagnostic measures for language disorders in preschool-aged children. 

"Diagnostic procedures that speech pathologists nationwide currently rely on are more than 35 years old, and many are based on data collected from fewer than 100 children. To correct this, Ratner and her team will spend the next five years analyzing data archived in an online repository called the Child Language Data Exchange System(CHILDES) that’s part of a larger, federally funded initiative called TalkBank. The research team will painstakingly comb through each record in an effort to establish better methods for diagnosing language problems in preschool-aged children."

Read more about Dr. Ratner's grant here.