Kansas University has received a five-year, $3.6 million grant for research on a wide range of communications disorders that affect people from infancy to old age, KU officials announced Friday.

The funding will be used to support current and future research projects on KU’s Lawrence campus and at the KU Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan.

The funds comes from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders.

Specifically, the funding will be used to create the Biobehavioral Neurosciences in Communicaitons Disorders Center at KU.

That new center will be the 13th research center affiliated with KU’s Schiefelbusch Life Span Institute. The new KU research center will be one of only 15 the federal agency has designated and funded.

Mabel Rice, a KU distinguished professor of speech-language-hearing, will direct the new center. Rice is an internationally renowned scholar in the area of child language acquisition and disorders.

The center will provide 12 researchers and 15 projects with administrative services, human subject recruitment and digital and electrical engineering.

Research at the center will look at causes and treatments of communication disorders by several means, including:

A study by John Columbo, professor of psychology, on how an infant’s ability to recognize and remember can predict later learning and speaking problems.

A study by Susan Kemper, distinguished professor of psychology, on how speech in older age reflects declines in working memory.

A study by Mark Chertoff, associate professor of hearing and speech at KU Medical Center, on developing more precise measures of hearing loss to aid designers of cochlear implants and hearing aids.

KU communication disorders research has already led to some real-world applications.

One is the first diagnostic test for specific language impairment, developed by Rice and Kenneth Wexler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Another is a high-tech pacifier that helps premature infants learn to nurse, which might help detect and prevent developmental disabilities.