about the Developmental Reading Group

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The Developmental Reading Group at Boys Town National Research Hospital is open discussion group in Omaha, NE, engaging in bi-weekly discussions on issues of human development. Please distribute to anyone who might be interested. Contact the group's moderator Mark VanDam if you would like more information or would like to present. Regular meetings are at 9:00am about every other Friday in room 311a/b at the Lied Learning and Technology Center at Boys Town National Research Hospital, 555 North 30th Street, Omaha, NE.

We encourage anyone interested in child development to attend, and we're always looking for new ideas and presenters. Normally we discuss current published research in any area of human development (so suggested papers are welcome), but will also use the forum for practice talks, internal review, grant brainstorming, and so on. As bait for discussants, weekly presenters shall provide donuts, Danishes, bear-claws, or equivalent.

There is a group at Boys Town National Research Hospital among others, Mary Pat Moeller is director of the Center for Childhood Deafness, Nick Smith is Coordinator of the Perceptual Developmental Laboratory, and Mark VanDam is an NIH postdoc with pscyholinguistics background looking to get together to talk about human development.

We don't really have plans to formally constrain what we want to talk about much further than what's already been mentioned, but here's a flavor of what we've been talking about lately: speech perception, audio-visual integration, theory of mind, speech/language/hearing with hearing impaired (eg, cochlear implants and other hearing prosthetics), language production-perception interface, word/sound/category/concept learning, (short-term) perceptual training, prosodic and music perception, acoustic correlates to language, head turn/looking/eye preference to acoustic stimuli, cognitive predictors of later development, 'different' versus 'delayed' development, how to improve methods with messy data (ie, kids), new technologies for lab and/or clinic, auditory-cognitive-social interactions, kids with less-than-severe hearing impairment, long term development of auditory experience/access in kids.

We are also interested in looking at seminal papers to some degree, but also what's hot and new and exciting (hopefully including our own work).