Boys Town Center for Childhood Deafness, Language and Learning

07/23/2026

Dr. Hope Lancaster, director of the Etiologies of Language and Literacy Laboratory, traveled to Amsterdam, Netherlands to present at the 2026 Annual Meeting of Behavioral Genetics Association.

With her colleagues, Drs. Fisher and Eising, they presented a poster on how self-reported communication skills are associated in adults in the Dutch Lifelines cohort.

During her trip, Dr. Lancaster visited her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics to discuss more science - from the genetics of synesthesia and music to expanding current collaborations for future projects.

07/09/2026

Check out what our friends in the Boys Town Center for Hearing Research are up to. These scientists are making strides in helping children get the help they need as early as possible.

Researchers at Boys Town have developed an assessment tool for measuring the early sounds that babies and toddlers make. It was designed to catch delays in speech development at a young age.

06/30/2026

Clinical Vestibular Lab

06/26/2026

Late talkers are children who use less words than other children their age. Caregivers or parents usually find out their child is a late talker around 18 to 24 months of age, when the child isn’t saying many words or putting together short phrases.

Right now, there’s no way to predict which child will catch up and who will need more support.

Help us learn how to support other parents or caregivers of late talkers.

Sign up at https://latetalkersproject-boystown.timetap.com/ #/

06/09/2026

There's so much information! How do we know what's real?

Our very own Emma Kate Thome, PhD, CCC-SLP of the Emerging Language Knowledge Lab sat down with Speech Pathology Australia to discuss what pseudoscience is and why it's so appealing.

A new episode of is out now.

Pseudoscientific approaches can be surprisingly appealing, even in a profession grounded in evidence-based practice.
In this week’s episode, we speak with Dr Emma Kate Thome from Boys Town National Research Hospital (USA) about how to identify and manage pseudoscientific practices in speech pathology.

Dr Thome explores:
• what pseudoscience looks like in practice
• why it can appeal to both clinicians and the people they support
• the risks it poses to safe, effective and evidence-based care.

This episode offers valuable insights for speech pathologists looking to strengthen their critical thinking and clinical decision-making.

🎧 Listen now: https://bit.ly/4vk8JyZ

05/28/2026

05/14/2026

05/05/2026

It's easy to get lost in all the noise. Finding a good pair of earplugs is a lot easier than you think.