Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences
Site Contents
Doctoral Recruitment
Purdue University's Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences has openings for doctoral students. If you are considering a research career in speech, language, or hearing sciences, apply to Purdue University. Faculty at Purdue are pursuing strong, active research programs in the following areas:
- Acquisition of speech and language, in normally developing infants and children; children with language impairments, including specific language impairment; and children with cochlear implants. (Dave Ertmer, Lisa Goffman, Laurence Leonard, David Snow)
- Speech physiology, including developmental, normal, and disordered speech production with a focus on respiration, articulation, and basic neural processes of motor control. (Lisa Goffman, Jessica Huber, Anne Smith)
- Sign language linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, syntax, and semantics from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. (Diane Brentari, Ronnie Wilbur)
- Neurolinguistics, including neurophonetics (focusing on perception of lexical tones and speech prosody) and neural bases of lexical and grammatical semantics in normal individuals and individuals with brain damage. (Jack Gandour, David Kemmerer)
- Neural systems for language processing in stuttering, language impairment, and bilingualism. (Chris Weber-Fox)
Psychoacoustics, focusing on cochlear mechanics and the role of efferent innervation of the cochlea in normal individuals and individuals with hearing impairment. (Beth Strickland) - Auditory electrophysiology, particularly as it reflects neural correlates of psychoacoustic phenomena. (Ravi Krishnan)
- Speech perception, including cross-language perception, perceptual learning by children and adults, and speech perception in infants. (Alex Francis, Amanda Seidl)
- Vocal fold physiology and voice disorders (Mahalakshmi Sivasankar)
- AAC across the life-span, including cross-linguistic/cultural studies of symbol acquisition and use, assistive technology, and test accommodation (Lyle L. Lloyd)
We are one of the most highly ranked graduate programs in our field. We typically provide funding to every admitted Ph.D. student. We offer Ph.D. degrees in our department in association with many interdisciplinary programs at Purdue, such as neuroscience and gerontology. Students at Purdue may choose to earn the Ph.D. degree with or without clinical certification in Audiology or Speech-Language Pathology. There is a shortage of candidates for faculty positions in communicative sciences and disorders, so employment prospects for PhD's from our program are exceptionally good, and graduates of our program go on to academic careers at other top-ranked programs.