Jan Edwards
Professor
Research Themes: The Communicating Mind and Body
Jan Edwards joined the University of Maryland Fall of 2016 as a faculty member in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences and she also serves as an Associate Director of the Maryland Language Science Center.
Her research centers on how preschool-aged children learn the sounds and words of language, how this relates to language skills, literacy and school success. She investigates how children learn to talk with a wide range of language experiences - multiple languages, cochlear implants, autism spectrum disorders, and mainstream and nonmainstream dialects of English.
One of her current grants is the UMD Toggle Talk Project, a randomized control trial of a dialect shifting curriculum for kindergarten and first grade children in the Baltimore City Public Schools.
Research Interests: Language acquisition, Phonological acquisition, Speech and language processing, Language diversity and dialect shifting, Speech perception and production, Language disorders, Cochlear implants