Research Highlight: The Center
At the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, two on-campus centers provide our Communicative Disorders graduate students important opportunities to get vital hands-on experience leading research projects and providing therapy techniques: the Speech Language and Hearing Center and the Doris B. Hawthorne Center for Communicative Disorders and Special Education.
Speech Language and Hearing Center 
The Speech Language and Hearing Center is housed in Burke-Hawthorne Hall and is open to clients of all ages and backgrounds with a range of communicative disorders. The Speech Language and Hearing Center, also known simply as “the Clinic,” has been serving the Lafayette community for more than 60 years and has provided more than 100,000 hours of service with little or no charge to families. We provide state-of-the-art communicative services to address:
- Articulation / Speech / Accent Modification
- Aphasia / Stroke
- Apraxia
- Audiological Services / Hearing Testing
- Augmentative /Alternative Communication
- Cochlear Implants / Hearing Impaired
- Developing Child Language
- Fluency
- Language Disorders
- Language and Literacy
- Stuttering
- Traumatic Brain Injury
- Voice Disorders
- Other Communicative Disorders
The Speech Language and Hearing Center serves three purposes:
- To provide communication services to community members who need it;
- To prepare our graduate students for certification to become speech language pathologists; and
- To serve as a research facility for our faculty and graduate students.
In the Center, our grad students provide therapies and services under the supervision of nationally-certified speech language pathologists. Clinical services are provided year-round, in addition to some specialty projects and more intensive programs, including the Language and Literacy Project, aphasia services, social communication groups, fluency groups, early language and communication, augmentative and alternative communication, and voice banking services for patients with degenerative diseases like ALS.
Learn more about the center and our specialty areas.
Doris B. Hawthorne Center
The Doris B. Hawthorne Center for Communicative Disorders and Special Education is the primary communicative disorder research center on campus. Here, faculty and graduate students collaborate to design techniques and strategies that help clients overcome the most problematic communicative disorder barriers.
The Hawthorne Center’s goal is to give clients the opportunity to improve their communication skills in authentic settings and real world contexts. Faculty working in the communicative disorder research center have published articles in the top professional journals in their field, outlining their evidence-based assessment and intervention practices and giving others the chance to employ these techniques across the world.
Learn more about the Hawthorne Center.
Ready to learn more about doing and applying communicative disorder research?
Find out more about our speech pathology and audiology MS program >
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