All about Language : Science, Theory, and Practice

Elena L. Grigorenko, Ph.D.,
Dr. Grigorenko received her Ph.D. in general psychology from Moscow State University, Russia, and her Ph.D. in developmental psychology and genetics from Yale University USA and her re-specialization in clinical (forensic) psychology from Fielding University , USA .Currently, Dr. Grigorenko has published more than 500 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and books. She has received multiple professional awards for her work and has received funding for her research from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Agency for International Development, Cure Autism Now, Foundation for Child Development, American Psychological Foundation, and other federal and private sponsoring organizations. Dr. Grigorenko has worked with children and their families in the United States as well as in Africa (Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar, the Gambia, and Zambia), India, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.

Peggy McCardle, Ph.D. , M.P.H., Owner, Peggy McCardle Consulting, LLC

Peggy McCardle is a private consultant and an affiliated research scientist at Haskins Laboratories. She is the former chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) , U.S. National Institutes of Health, where she also directed the Language, Bilingualism, and Biliteracy Research Program and developed various literacy initiatives. Dr. McCardle is a linguist, a former speech-language pathologist, and, in her remote past, a classroom teacher. Her publications address various aspects of public health and developmental psycholinguistics. The recipient of various awards for her work in federal government, including a 2013 NICHD Mentor Award, she also was selected in 2013 to receive the Einstein Award from The Dyslexia Foundation. Her publications address various aspects of public health and developmental psycholinguistics (e.g. , language development, bilingualism, reading, learning disabilities) . Dr. McCardle has taught scientific and technical writing and has extensive experience developing and coediting volumes and thematic journal issues.

Leonard Abbeduto, Ph.D., is the Director of the MIND Institute, the Tsakopoulos-Vismara Endowed Chair, and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Abbeduto’s research is focused broadly on the development of language across the lifespan in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders and the family context for language development. Dr. Abbeduto has received numerous awards, including the Emil A. Steiger Award for Distinguished Teaching from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Faculty Stewardship Award from the University of California, Davis, the Enid and William Rosen Research Award from the National Fragile X Foundation, and Edgard Doll Award for Distinguished Research Contributions from Division 33 of the American Psychological Association. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1982.

Laura A. Barquero, M.S., Doctoral Candidate, Special Education, Education and Brain Sciences Research Lab, Vanderbilt University, PMB 228, 230 Appleton Place, Nashville, Tennessee 37203.

Laura Barquero is a doctoral candidate in Special Education at the Peabody College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. Her current research explores using functional MRI to explore responsiveness to reading intervention for children with reading difficulties.

Laurie E. Cutting, Ph.D., Patricia and Rodes Hart Endowed Chair and Professor, Peabody College of Education and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37203.

Laurie Cutting holds faculty appointments in the Departments of Special Education, Psychology, Radiology, and Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University, is a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories, and has an adjunct faculty position at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Department of Neurology. Her research focuses on educational neuroscience—in particular, the neurobiological and behavioral underpinnings of reading, oral language, and dyslexia.

David J. Francis, Ph.D., Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Chair, Department of Psychology, University of Houston, 4811 Calhoun Road, 3rd Floor, Houston, Texas 77204

Dr. David J. Francis is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair of Quantitative Methods and former Chairman of the Department of Psychology (2002-2014) at the University of Houston, where he also serves as Director of the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics. He was a recipient of the 2006 Albert J. Harris Award from the International Reading Association, and has received the University of Houston's Teaching Excellence Award and the Excellence in Research and Scholarship Award, and in 2008 received the Esther Farfel Award, which recognizes career accomplishments in research, teaching, and service, and is the highest award given to faculty members at the University of Houston.

Joan A. Mele-McCarthy, D.A., Executive Director, the Summit School, 664 East Central Avenue, Edgewater, Maryland 21037.

Joan Mele-McCarthy is the executive director of the Summit School, a school designed for students who have dyslexia and other learning differences. Prior to this position, she served as a special assistant to the assistant secretary for special education/rehabilitation services in the U.S. Department of Education and worked on policy issues related to the connections between special education and general education and between English Learners and disabilities. She also has served on university faculties in departments of communication sciences and disorders, owned and directed a private practice that provided direct intervention and school consultation, and worked in public schools. Her work is focused on language-based learning differences and special education policy.

Robin D. Morris, Ph.D., Regents Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 5010, Atlanta, GA 30302-5010.
Dr. Morris is Associate Provost for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation and Regent’s Professor of Psychology at Georgia State University. He holds joint appointments in the Department of Educational Psychology and Special Education and the Neurosciences Institute. His scholarly and clinical work focuses on the biological and environmental factors that influence academic, attentional, and social development in children and adolescents. His current research is focused on interventions for dyslexia and reading disabilities, mitochondrial disease, using technology to assist in reading development, and the neuroimaging of the typical and atypically developing brain.

Kenneth R. Pugh, Ph.D., President, Director of Research, and Senior Scientist, Haskins Laboratories, 300 George Street, Suite 900, New Haven, Connecticut 06511.

Kenneth R. Pugh—in addition to his positions at Haskins Laboratories, a Yale University and University of Connecticut affiliated interdisciplinary institute that is dedicated to the investigation of the biological bases of language—holds positions at the University of Connecticut, Yale University, and the Yale University School of Medicine. He directs the Yale Reading Center, is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the International Dyslexia Association and the Rodin Remediation Academy in Stockholm, and has served as a peer reviewer at the National Institutes of Health and as a panel member at the National Research Council of the National Academies. His research in cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics focuses on the neurobiology of typical and atypical language and reading development.

Dr. Rice received her doctoral degree from the University of Kansas, where she is University Distinguished Professor of Speech-Language-Hearing and Director of the Child Language Doctoral Program and the Merrill Advanced Studies Center. She has held Visiting Scientist appointments at the Center for Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has extensive research and clinical experience with children with specific language impairment (SLI). Early in her career she worked as a speech-language pathologist in public schools. In collaboration with Kim A. Wilcox, she established the demonstration Language Acquisition Preschool (LAP) at the University of Kansas. Her current research addresses several aspects of the condition of SLI: social and academic consequences, morphology, lexical learning, and preschool language intervention. Her publications include the edited volumes The Teachability of Language and Toward a Genetics of Language, as well as numerous journal articles and invited chapters.

Raúl Rojas, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is an associate professor at The University of Texas at Dallas, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Callier Center for Communication Disorders. Dr. Rojas's research focuses on child language from a longitudinal and processing perspective, specifically dual language development in typically developing children and in children with language impairments. He is particularly interested in dual language growth and in validating paradigms to index processing load and early language learning in bilingual children. Dr. Rojas, a nationally certified speech-language pathologist, has provided bilingual (Spanish-English) speech-language pathology services in multiple settings including schools and early intervention.

Dr. Snowling is Professor of Psychology at the University of York in the Department of Psychology in Heslington, York, UK.

Richard K. Wagner, Ph.D., Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology and W. Russell and Eugenia Morcom Chair, Florida State University; Tallahassee, Florida; rkwagner@psy.fsu.edu. Dr. Wagner also is a cofounder and the current associate director of the Florida Center for Reading Research. He earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Yale University in 1985. He previously earned a master’s degree in school psychology from the University of Akron. His major areas of research interest are dyslexia and the normal acquisition of reading. He currently is the principal investigator of the Multidisciplinary Learning Disability Center funded by NICHD.

Jason D. Zevin, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, 1300 York Avenue, Box 140, New York, NY 10065; and Senior Scientist, Haskins Laboratories, 300 George Street, New Haven, CT, 06511.
Dr. Zevin is an associate professor of psychology at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell Medical College and Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories. As an undergraduate research assistant, he helped conduct a study in which participants were asked to name words according to spelling-to-sound rules rather than their correct pronunciations (a reversal of the frequency effect was found). Nearly two decades later, he has begun to ask whether the tasks used to study reading in the laboratory might be more generally prone to task-specific phenomena and is considering alternatives.