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).