University at Buffalo (UB)
Dr. Alison Eisel Hendricks, director of the University at Buffalo Language Learning Lab has received a 3-year Early Career Award grant from the National Institutes of Health- National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIH/NIDCD) to identify differences in the use of non-mainstream dialect features among school-age children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Even though about two students in each classroom are affected by DLD (7-9% of students), many students are not getting the help they need. While DLD is often under-identified in mainstream American populations, both over-identification and under-identification are common in children who speak non-mainstream dialects, such as African American English (AAE). The long-term goal of this research is to better capture experiences of diverse students and help clinicians to make more accurate diagnostic decisions for children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.