Welcome

Directed by D. Kimbrough Oller, Ph.D. and Eugene Buder, Ph.D., this laboratory is dedicated to research on the emergence of the speech capacity and the evolution of language. Much of the work concentrates on infant vocal development and young child phonology, but there is also considerable effort on communicative functions in both humans and non-humans. The laboratory continues a line of work that Oller has pursued for over 45 years under funding from the National Institutes of Deafness and other Communication Disorders (the current primary funding agency for the laboratory), the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institutes of Mental Health, as well as a variety of private sources including, currently, the Plough Foundation. The laboratory has numerous collaborators both at the University of Memphis (especially Eugene Buder and Linda Jarmulowicz) and at academic institutions in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.