This research is being done to help us understand whether and how the use of a drug, called escitalopram (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or SSRI), may improve language therapy effectiveness, as measured when naming untrained pictures and describing pictures, in individuals with aphasia within three months after a stroke.

Another goal of part of this study is to investigate the particular concentration of certain molecules in the brain of people with following a stroke and how the SSRI might change this. This will allow us to better understand how brains change in people receiving language therapy.

After a stroke, many people experience a language impairment called aphasia. One of the most debilitating types of aphasia is non-fluent aphasia. Non-fluent aphasia is defined by significantly reduced speech production, with the speaker producing only a few words or even less. Speech entrainment therapy (SET) is a treatment that has been shown to increase fluency in people with non-fluent aphasia. Our study looks to define the best dose of SET that leads to sustained improvements in spontaneous speech production.
Participants who are eligible will undergo baseline language testing, an MRI, and will be randomized into one of 4 treatment groups: SET for 3 weeks, SET for 4.5 weeks, SET for 6 weeks, and no treatment (control group).

Early intervention for infants and toddlers with or at-risk for autism spectrum disorder can promote developmental skills and improve lifelong outcomes. Yet, many children with ASD are not diagnosed until after age 3. In order to improve early detection of ASD, we are investigating very early predictors of social communication challenges in infants as young as 1 week to 6 months of age.

This research study examines how the development of attention and motor skills in the first year of life is associated with the emergence of social and communication skills in three groups of infants: infants who are first born or who have a sibling with no developmental delays, infants who have an older sibling diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and infants who were born preterm.

Older adults typically have trouble identifying the speech they hear, especially in noisy environments. Fortunately, compared to younger adults, older adults are better able to compensate for difficulties identifying the speech they hear by recruiting the visual system. However, the extent to which older adults can benefit from visual input, and how this influence relates to age-related changes in brain structure and function, have not been thoroughly investigated. The general purpose of this study is to determine how age-related changes in brain structure and function affect how well people hear and see. This study seeks participants with normal hearing to mild hearing loss, who also have normal or corrected-to-normal vision.

We are recruiting mothers of children with typical development, autism, or fragile X syndrome.

This study focuses on parental experiences and normal individual differences that may influence child language development. The broader goal of the study is to understand which family experiences support language development in children who have neurodevelopmental disabilities, such as autism. We are recruiting families who have children who are typically developing, have autism, or have fragile X syndrome.