Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences PhD student awarded prestigious F31 Fellowship

Written By: Denise Buhrmester, buhrmest@purdue.edu

Mariel Schroeder

Mariel Schroeder, a combined MS-SLP and PhD graduate student in Purdue University’s Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences (SLHS) whose research focuses on language development, has been awarded the prestigious extramural F31 Fellowship from the NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. The award provides predoctoral individuals with supervised research training in specified health and health-related areas leading toward their research degree.

“Mariel’s highly competitive F31 Fellowship reflects her remarkable ability to bridge cutting-edge science and clinical practice, driving forward multidisciplinary research that enhances our understanding of communication and its disorders,” said Michael Heinz, SLHS professor and interim head.

Schroeder’s grant, titled “Building Morphosyntactic Networks in Preschoolers With and Without Developmental Language Disorder,” will support a collaborative research project between SLHS professor Arielle Borovsky’s Language Learning and Meaning Acquisition Lab and SLHS Rachel E. Stark Distinguished Professor Laurence Leonard’s Child Language Lab. Borovsky and Leonard serve as Schroeder’s graduate mentors on the grant. The research will advance the understanding of language development and disorders in early childhood by seeking to better understand the factors that contribute to difficulty using grammar in development language disorder (DLD). DLD is a prevalent language disorder that affects 7-13% of the population and persists throughout adulthood.

About the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at Purdue University

The Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences (SLHS) is renowned for excellence in research and education with its No. 2 speech-language pathology and No. 5 audiology programs (U.S. News & World Report) consistently named among the top in the country. SLHS research and clinical laboratories facilitate cutting-edge scientific discoveries to mechanistically investigate and treat a variety of hearing, speaking, language and swallowing disorders. The department delivers high-quality clinical services to the local community and provides students with exemplary education through four degree programs. Learn more.