Nan Ratner
University of Maryland, MD·Psychology
Some children who start talking late never fully catch up. Roughly 20–30% of late-talking children keep lagging behind their peers and are later diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD), a lasting difficulty with learning and using language.
- Fields
Psychology
Education Research
Computer Science
- Topics
developmental language disorder
late talkers
language delay
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Identify the syntactic, vocabulary and spelling features that distinguish the writing of students with developmental language disorder (DLD) from typical peers across grades 6–11, by annotating the PERSUADE essay corpus utterance by utterance.
- Build AcadEval, a free open-access "writing report card" software that compares a student's writing with grade-level benchmarks and generates individualized profiles of strengths and intervention needs.
- Distinguish English language variation, such as African-American English, from language disorder in student writing, using the demographic labels in the PERSUADE corpus.
- Release a newly annotated corpus of student essays and open computational tools built on TalkBank for researchers, teachers and clinicians.
More about the research
Their struggles show up clearly in school writing, but there is little data on which specific grammar, vocabulary or spelling problems teachers and clinicians should target. Earlier studies mostly measured broad features such as how long a writing sample is or how varied its vocabulary is, which offers little guidance for planning help for an individual student.
Why it matters
Students with developmental language disorder face lasting academic, social and job-related setbacks. A free tool that pinpoints a student's specific weaknesses in grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary and spelling could help teachers and speech-language specialists plan more focused writing interventions. Separating dialect differences from disorder could also reduce the misidentification of students who speak varieties such as African-American English.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michelle Schlandant
University of Miami, FL·Education Research
Explore how Spanish- and Haitian Creole-speaking caregivers and early care and education teachers recognize typical versus delayed language development in dual language learners, and what shapes their decisions to seek help, through native-language interviews.
Elena Koulidobrova
Central Connecticut State University, CT·Social Science
Build treebanks, collections of sentences annotated for grammatical structure in the Universal Dependencies format, that capture how evidential markers (grammatical signals of information source) and focus features appear in sentences.
Emily Morgan
University of California-Davis, CA·Psychology
Build computational models of how speakers combine general constraints, such as the length of the receiver, with verb-specific preferences when choosing between the two English dative structures for verbs like give and send.
The school
University of Maryland: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 602 research doctorates a year.
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