Eliana Colunga, Ph.D.
University of Colorado Boulder
Eliana Colunga is an Associate Professor in the department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Computer Science Department, and a faculty fellow with the Institute of Cognitive Science at CU Boulder. Dr. Colunga received her PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Indiana University and her MS in Artificial Intelligence and BS in Computer Science from the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) in Monterrey, Mexico. Her lab studies interactions between language and cognition using cross-linguistic, developmental and computational modeling methods, creating computer models that simulate how young children learn words in different situations to understand how language develops. Her work has been funded by the John Merck scholars foundation, the National Institute of Health, and the National Science Foundation.
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Pamela A. Hadley, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Pamela A. Hadley, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, ASHA Fellow, is Professor and Head of Speech and Hearing Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is also Director of the Applied Psycholinguistics Lab. Her research focuses on improving the identification of young children at-risk for developmental language disorder (DLD) and the development of effective, evidenced-based early grammatical interventions. She is deeply committed to translational research and aligning research efforts with the needs of practitioners.
For over 30 years, Dr. Hadley has worked to provide more precise, longitudinal characterizations of early grammatical development for young children with specific language impairment/DLD as well as children developing typically. Most recently, she has explored properties of parent language input that promote the transition from words to sentences and developed “toy talk,” a simple descriptive commenting strategy designed to promote children’s sentence development.
Dr. Hadley has been a principal investigator or co-investigator on multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She is currently a co-PI on a clinical trial (NCT03782493) examining the effects of a parent-implemented intervention focused on sentence development for preschoolers at-risk for DLD funded by NIDCD and a co-PI on the National AI Institute for Exceptional Education funded by NSF/IES.
Session: TBA
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Casey Lew-Williams, Ph.D.
Princeton University
Dr. Casey Lew-Williams is Professor and Department Chair in Psychology at Princeton University. He directs the Princeton Baby Lab, where his students and postdocs study how young children learn from the dynamics of their communicative environments. They use a combination of experimental, descriptive, computational, and social neuroscience approaches to study language learning in typical learners, children facing adversity, and children growing up bilingual. Their recent work has been funded by NICHD, the McDonnell Foundation, and Wellcome Leap. He received his PhD at Stanford University, did his postdoc at UW-Madison’s Waisman Center (and loved it), and was previously on the faculty at Northwestern University in Communication Sciences and Disorders. He is a chief editor of Frontiers for Young Minds (a science journal for kids) and co-founder of ManyBabies (a collaborative group of 680 developmental scientists from around the world).
Session: TBA
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Rhiannon Luyster, Ph.D.
Emerson College
Dr. Luyster is currently an Associate Professor at Emerson College. She holds a PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan, a MEd in Special Education from Boston College and a BA in Psychology from Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on early development in autism. Her early work included co-authoring the Toddler Module of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule – 2nd edition (ADOS-2), and her current program of research explores how children with autism learn and use language. She is particularly interested in the various strategies that autistic children use to learn language, as well as external factors that influence language acquisition in autism; more recently, she has begun to consider what we might learn by studying patterns of language use — including “unconventional” language — in autistic individuals. Dr. Luyster has published dozens of peer-reviewed articles, and her work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and several private foundations. Dr. Luyster was the recipient of the Emerson College Alumni Award for Teaching Innovation in 2016. She was awarded a Huret Faculty Excellence Award in 2021 and a Norman and Irma Mann Stearns Award in 2023.
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View previous years’ poster and speaker information in the SRCLD Archive.
Supported in part by: NIDCD and NICHD, NIH, R13 DC001677, Margarita Kaushanskaya and Audra Sterling, Principal Investigators
University of Wisconsin-Madison – Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders