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James Montgomery, Ph.D., is a Professor in Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences. His area of expertise is language and cognitive sciences with application to childhood language impairment and reading comprehension disabilities. He was a practicing speech-language pathologist for many years in various interdisciplinary clinical settings and focused on the diagnosis and treatment of language impairment in school-age children. 

Dr. Montgomery’s research program has focused on understanding how children with developmental language disorder come to learn grammar and develop an efficient language processing system, a system that is used for listening, reading, and writing. These are children who are typically developing except for language abilities. Auditory sentence comprehension deficits are a hallmark feature of the children, and these deficits are closely related to their reading comprehension and writing deficits. His research has examined how these children’s auditory comprehension impairments relate to their (a) ability to discover the grammar patterns in the language from the language they hear around them, (b) verbal working memory abilities (i.e., ability to store verbal material and process that material or new, incoming material at the same time), and (c) ability to create new, more complex language knowledge in long-term memory. This research program has been funded by various grants from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. He has published widely in different peer-reviewed journals across various disciplines.       

Dr. Montgomery has taken the findings from his previous work (as well as others’ work) and translated it into two novel intervention approaches to enhance the grammar knowledge and comprehension abilities of these children. The work is being done in collaboration with colleagues from Utah State University and the University of Arizona. This research, a clinical trials treatment project, is funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.