Study Offers First Look at How Children with Cerebral Palsy Develop Language Skills

Katie Hustad, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
Katie Hustad, Ph.D., CCC-SLP

Katie Hustad, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, and her research efforts were recently featured in the campus news.

A new study of children with cerebral palsy could help ease the speech and language challenges many of these children face as they get older.

Published in the journal Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, it is the first to show that language comprehension skills of children with cerebral palsy can accurately predict their language skills later in life.

“This means that if we identify children with cerebral palsy as young as 24 to 30 months who are very likely to have significant language problems later in life, we may be able to change or improve the course of their development through very early speech-language therapy,” says lead author Katherine Hustad, a professor and chair of the Department of Communications Sciences and Disorders at UW–Madison.

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