I am a research scientist at Boys Town National Research Hospital studying child language development, heading the Emerging Language Knowledge (ELK) Lab. I am also a certified speech-language pathologist.

My research focuses on understanding the language development of children with early language delay and disorders. I primarily work with toddlers with early language delay (often called “late talkers”) and older children aged 3-6 years with developmental language disorder (DLD), a life-long condition that occurs in roughly 7-9% of the population characterized by difficulties in language learning and processing. My work focuses on understanding how children with language delays and disorders represent and process language with the ultimate goal of designing clinical interventions to support these children’s language development.

One part of my research concentrates on understanding how children with DLD respond to the statistical properties of language like frequency and predictability and how we could use these properties to support language learning in clinical settings. A second part of my research is about understanding the contributions of prior vocabulary and world knowledge to verb learning and verb-mediated sentence processing by children with DLD and early language delay. 

Link to my CV: PDF

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_L7N5UQAAAAJ&hl=en