Speech Language Research Unit Ghent

The research group focuses on two major research areas within speech (therapy) and language. The research focuses on different populations: children, adults and elderly with a specific focus on special groups (such as singers, professional speakers, speech therapy students, schisis patients, gender variant individuals, vocal fold paralyses, etc...).

Speech

Speech disorders

This research focuses on perceptual and instrumental analysis of speech, resonance, articulation and oromyofunctional behavior (e.g. open mouth behavior, infantile swallowing). It also evaluates the effectiveness of interventions for speech disorders to optimize speech therapy care and patient quality of life.

Voice disorders

This research focuses on optimizing perceptual and instrumental diagnostics of the voice and voice disorders including acoustic phonetics. In addition, the effectiveness of voice therapy and voice techniques is evaluated to developpe an innovative model for voice therapy.

Resonance disorders

This research focuses on resonance of speech. Hypernasality is a common resonance problem that can negatively affect articulation and speech intelligibility. A specific target group here are individuals who were born with schisis. This research focuses on the innovation of perceptual and instrumental measurement of resonance, the development and evaluation of evidence-based treatment techniques and interventions, and the development of tools to assess quality of life.

Articulation and oromyofunctional disorders

This research focuses on mapping articulation and dialects. In addition, the possible effects of oromyofunctional disorders, such as open-mouth behavior and infantile swallowing, on articulation are investigated.

Language

The focus of this research area is the study of multilingualism.

Articulation and language skills as well as speech intelligibility of different multilingual groups are studied herein. The main focus is to optimize the diagnosis of language problems in multilingual children, the language skills of children with DCD and language development in twins.