COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- Researchers at the University of Maryland were recently awarded a $3.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences to investigate the efficacy of Toggle Talk—a proprietary curriculum intended to help young children learn to shift between various American English dialects and Academic Classroom English. 

Young children often come to public schools from a diverse range of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, bringing with them a variety of American English dialects that are spoken in their homes. The subtle differences between their spoken dialect and the English taught in the classroom can significantly impact the development of students’ listening, language and foundational skills. 

Toggle Talk, which was developed by Professor Holly Craig (University of Michigan) under a previous grant funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, uses “contrastive analysis” to teach children how to make situationally-appropriate language choices—providing young children with the vocabulary and language structure awareness necessary to switch between their home language and more formal, academic language. Dr. Jan Edwards, professor in UMD's Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences and Associate Director of the Language Science Center, is planning a closely monitored local rollout of the Toggle Talk curriculum in collaboration with her co-investigators, Jeff Harring (HDQM), Rebecca Silverman (CHSE) and Ana Taboada Barber (CHSE). 

“The focus here is on spoken language,” said Dr. Edwards. “It’s a preventative program that teaches children about shifting between dialects as soon as they enter a school environment.” 

Part of the reason early exposure to this curriculum is so vital involves how children develop fundamental reading skills, Dr. Edwards said. “We often ask our students to ‘sound it out.’ When the language spoken at home is different than that spoken in the classroom–silent letters or grammatical differences–it can mean real challenges for the students. The earlier we can help students resolve these differences, the better.” 

The Toggle Talk curriculum addresses these challenges by teaching young children about language differentiation and how to flexibly shift between two dialects, without devaluing the language spoken within their homes. 

“About a third of all children cannot make this shift by the end of 2nd grade. These students are at the highest risk to fall behind in literacy acquisition,” said Dr. Edwards. The hope is that this innovative curriculum can help researchers and educators identify opportunities to close the achievement gap for children in public school systems across the nation. 

Dr. Edwards’ team is also interested in learning more about how dialect shifting impacts students’ cognitive bandwidth. This process may offer students similar cognitive benefits to shifting between languages. 

“Bilingual students have what some call the ‘metalinguistic advantage’, because of their ability to think about language and manipulate its components in ways that monolingual speakers are less free to do so,” said Dr. Taboada Barber. “I am especially interested in finding out if the impact of Toggle Talk instruction can render similar benefits for dialect shifting than those afforded to bilingual or multilingual students.”

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- Three University of Maryland engineers have been awarded new National Science Foundation (NSF) grants through an NSF program that fosters research on how human neural and cognitive systems interact and intersect with advances in engineering, computer science and education. 

These grants are among 19 NSF awards issued to U.S. cross-disciplinary teams to conduct work that is  “bold, risky, and transcends the perspectives and approaches typical of single-discipline research efforts.” According to the agency, the awards will contribute to NSF’s investments in fundamental brain research, in particular support of Understanding the Brain and the BRAIN Initiative, a coordinated research effort that seeks to accelerate the development of new neurotechnologies.

Professor Jonathan Simon, who holds joint appointments in electrical and computer engineering (ECE), biology and UMD’s Institute for Systems Research (ISR), and Assistant Professor Behtash Babadi, who holds joint appointments in ECE and ISR, have received a $900,000 grant for research that will take advantage of recent advances in noninvasive neuroimaging to learn more about how the brain’s neural mechanisms work in adaptive auditory processing. Simon and Babadi are two of more than 140 UMD faculty in the university’s Brain and Behavior Initiative, which seeks to revolutionize the interface between engineers and neuroscientists by generating novel tools and approaches to understand complex behaviors produced by the human brain.

UMD Associate Professor Sarah Bergbreiter, who holds a joint appointment in mechanical engineering and ISR,  and two colleagues from Northwestern University, L. Catherine Brinson and Mitra Hartmann, were awarded a $1,000,000 grant to better understand how animals use the sense of touch to gather information and then use this information to perform complex behaviors. The University of Maryland’s portion of the grant is $320,000.

Using brain imaging to study how our brains adapt  to varying sound environments 

Recent, growing evidence suggests that sophisticated brain functions happen when more than one region of the brain is activated at the same time, and the brain forms networks between these regions that can dynamically reconfigure. These networks allow humans to rapidly adapt to changes in their sound environment, such as when walking from a quiet street into a noisy party. Currently, little is known about the workings of these brain networks, which bind, organize, and give meaning to higher cognitive functions.

Adaptive auditory processing is one such higher function. It is the brain’s ability to attend to, segregate, and track one of many sound sources, to learn its identity, commit it to memory, robustly recognize it, and use it to make decisions. And it is in this area that the new NSF funding will support new research by Simon and Babadi. 

“Deciphering the neural mechanisms underlying the brain’s network dynamics is critical to understanding how the brain carries out universal cognitive processes such as attention, decision-making and learning,” notes Simon. “However, the sheer high-dimensionality of dynamic neuroimaging data, together with the complexity of these [brain] networks, has created serious challenges, in practice, in its data analysis, signal processing, and neural modeling.”

The researchers will use modern signal processing techniques to combine high temporal resolution, non-invasive recordings with high spatial resolutions.

“Our work will bring new insight to the dynamic organization of cortical networks at unprecedented spatiotemporal resolutions, and can thereby impact technology in the areas of brain-computer interfacing and neuromorphic engineering,” says Babadi. “It will also allow for the creation of engineering solutions for early detection and monitoring of cognitive disorders involving auditory perception and attention.”

Neuromorphic engineering is the use of a very large-scale system of integrated circuits to mimic neuro-biological architectures present in the nervous system.

Using robotic whiskers to help understand how animal brains’ use real ones

The research by Bergbreiter and her two Northwestern colleagues will advance understanding of how animals first gather information through the sense of touch and then how the use this information to perform complex behaviors.  At Maryland, Bergbreiter will be developing artificial, modular, reconfigurable whiskers that imitate the functions of animal whiskers.  

The whiskers will be mounted on robotic platforms that can mimic the head movements of animals, contributing to the development of novel robots and sensors that use touch to sense an object’s location, shape, and texture, to track fluid wakes in water, and to sense the direction of airflow.

“Engineering arrays of sensors to serve as physical models of a rat's whiskers will allow us to better understand the connections between what a rat senses and its actions,” Bergbreiter says. “Using this understanding, we can design robots with the ability to explore dark areas or work in other challenging environments that require a sense of touch or flow.”

The NSF Neural and Cognitive Science Program

The complexities of brain and behavior pose fundamental questions in many areas of science and engineering, drawing intense interest across a broad spectrum of disciplinary perspectives while eluding explanation by any one of them. Rapid advances within and across disciplines are leading to an increasingly interconnected fabric of theories, models, empirical methods and findings, and educational approaches, opening new opportunities to understand complex aspects of neural and cognitive systems through integrative multidisciplinary approaches. According to NSF this program seeks to support innovative, integrative, boundary-crossing proposals that can best capture those opportunities

"It takes insight and courage to tackle these problems," said Ken Whang, NSF program director in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE). "These teams are combining their expertise to try to forge new paths forward on some of the most complex and important challenges of understanding the brain. They are posing problems in new ways, taking intellectual and technical risks that have huge potential payoff."