Brian A. Goldstein, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, s the Chief Academic Officer and Executive Dean at the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences, San Marcos, CA. Dr. Goldstein is well-published in the area of communication development and disorders in Latino children focusing on speech sound development and disorders in monolingual Spanish and Spanish-English bilingual children. He is the former editor of Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, is a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), and received the Certificate of Recognition for Special Contribution in Multicultural Affairs from ASHA.
Raquel T. Anderson, Ph.D., is professor at the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington Campus. She teaches and conducts research in the area of child language development and disorders in both monolingual and bilingual populations, with a particular focus on Spanish, and Spanish-English speakers. She directs the master’s level bilingual track program, STEPS, in the department.
Lisa M. Bedore, Ph.D., studies language development and disorders in Spanish-English bilinguals. Work on typical bilingual language acquisition provides a foundation for her work focusing on identification of clinical markers to accurately identify children with language impairment and to identify targets for language intervention. Her work was been funded by the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
Karin M. Boerger, Ph.D., earned her M.S. from Rush University, and after working several years as a bilingual speech-language pathologist, she returned for her doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. She is passionate about guiding graduate students through differential diagnoses of language differences and disorders and working with pre-school aged, emergent English speakers.
María R. Brea, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, research investigated interactions between Spanish-specific phonotactic patterns and nonword repetition performance in emerging bilingual children. More recent research collaborations have focused on discourse coherence and syntactic complexity in children with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and oral-written language learning disabilities. Additional areas of interest include the impact of strategic writing instructional approaches on children’s expository text composition and the influence of multicultural funds of knowledge on family literacy practices.
Barbara Conboy, Ph.D., is currently a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Mind, Brain & Learning at the University of Washington. She earned a doctorate in language and communicative disorders at the University of California, San Diego/San Diego State University; a Master of Arts degree in speech-language-hearing at Temple University; and a bachelor of arts in Latin American studies at Smith College. She is certified by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association as a speech-language pathologist and has worked extensively with bilingual children with language-learning disorders. Her research interests include early bilingualism, experiential factors in language acquisition and brain development, and the early identification and treatment of language impairment in bilingual children.
Soloman J. Cooperson, Ph.D., completed his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. His interests include development and disorders of phonology and morphosyntax.
Christina Gildersleeve-Neumann, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Portland State University where she co-founded the PSU Bilingual Concentration and the Education for SLPs in Ecuador Program. Her research, teaching, and clinical interests focus on typical and atypical speech development in Spanish-English bilingual children. She has published and presented research on these topics for over 20 years.
Vera Gutiérrez-Clellen is professor emeritus in the School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at San Diego State University. Her research focused on the development of assessment measures for bilingual Spanish–English children and the evaluation of language intervention approaches for Latino children with language impairments.
Aquiles Iglesias, Ph.D., is a Professor and the Founding Director of the Speech-Language Pathology program at the University of Delaware. Dr. Iglesias’ work focuses on language development and assessment of Bilingual (Spanish/English) children. He is the author of the Bilingual/English Spanish Assessment (BESA), Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT), the Quick Interactive Language Screener (QUILS), and the Quick Interactive Language Screener: English/Spanish (QUILS: ES).
Donna Jackson-Maldonado, Ph.D., is a researcher who has lived in Mexico since her childhood. She is a bilingual specialist in monolingual and bilingual language development in children with different language disorders and those who are typically developing. She has developed several language assessment instruments, including the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories.
Ellen Stubbe Kester, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, founded Bilinguistics to meet the speech and language needs of children from diverse backgrounds. She provides workshops around the United States and beyond on bilingualism, assessment of bilingual students, and effective intervention practices with diverse populations. Her research and clinical work address the important issue of differentiating bilingual children with typical development from those with language impairment, and identifying appropriate goals for intervention with bilinguals.
Lisa M. López, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of South Florida, Tampa. Dr. López earned her Ph.D. in applied developmental psychology from the University of Miami and completed a National Science Foundation-funded postdoctoral fellowship in language and literacy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She serves as Chair of the Society for Research in Child Development Latinx Caucus (2019–2021). Her research agenda involves understanding and improving upon the educational and environmental opportunities of Latino dual language learner (DLL) children in the United States. Her main research objective is to identify the developmental trajectory of school readiness skills for Latino DLL children while applying an ecological perspective to better understand this developmental trajectory. Her research has been funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), and the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and published in journals focused on both education and developmental psychology. Dr. López has won numerous awards for her scholarly and community work with the Latino DLL population.
Johanne Paradis, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Adjunct Professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Alberta. Her research is concerned with bilingualism in children with typical development and in children with developmental disorders, in particular children learning English as a second language from immigrant and refugee families. Dr. Paradis has published more than 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters on dual language development in children and is the recipient of a Health Scholar Award from the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research and the National Achievement Award from the Canadian Linguistic Association. She is actively involved in knowledge mobilization and professional development activities with clinicians and educators working with dual language children. Dr. Paradis is the editor of Journal of Child Language.
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D., has conducted research for more than 35 years on first and second language acquisition with a special emphasis on young bilingual and bi-dialectal speakers. Her most recent book is Raising a Bilingual Child, published in English by Random House, in Spanish by Bilingual Readers, in Polish by Media Rodzina, and in Mandarin by Beijing Language and Culture University Press. She is a co-author, with Seymour, Roeper, de Villiers & de Villiers of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation tests from Ventris Learning.
Elizabeth Peña, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Her work focuses on differentiating language impairment from language difference in bilingual children. Her assessment work employs a variety of methods including standardized and dynamic assessment. She is interested in how children from diverse linguistic backgrounds learn new language skills and how they lexicalize their conceptual knowledge across two languages and has published extensively in these areas. She is a Fellow of the American Speech, Language, and Hearing Association.
Nan Bernstein Ratner, Ed.D., Professor and Chair, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, The University of Maryland, College Park, 0100 Lefrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742
Nan Bernstein Ratner is Professor and Chair, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, The University of Maryland, College Park. She has published widely in the areas of typical and atypical language development, fluency and stuttering, and parent-child interaction. She is the coauthor of the texts Psycholinguistics (Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998) and The Development of Language, Eighth Edition (Pearson, 2012), both with Jean Berko Gleason, and A Handbook on Stuttering, Sixth Edition (Delmar Cengage Learning, 2008), with the late Oliver Bloodstein. She is a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
M. Adelaida Restrepo, Ph.D., is the Assistant Dean for Research and Professor in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. She is the director of the Bilingual Language and Literacy Laboratory, whose main mission is to identify best language assessment and intervention practices for bilingual children at risk of academic difficulties. She is a bilingual speech-language pathologist who has had ongoing funding for at least 16 years in projects building oral language and literacy in preschool, kindergarten and school-age children who speak Spanish as their native language. She is a former associate editor from Language, Speech and Hearing Services in the Schools, and reviews and publishes in a variety of journals in English and Spanish. She is a certified member of the American Speech Language and Hearing Association. She was funded by Fulbright Scholars grant to conduct a project in Israel on response to intervention.
Barbara Rodríguez, Ph.D., Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and ASHA-certified speech-language pathologist, has worked extensively with bilingual children with language-learning disorders. Her research interests include bilingual language development and the identification of language-learning difficulties in bilingual children.
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.
Li Sheng, Ph.D.,
is the director of the Language Learning and Bilingualism Laboratory at the University of Delaware. Her current projects examine how linguistic typology affects vocabulary and grammar development in bilinguals who speak different first languages such as Mandarin and Spanish. She is also interested in the manifestations of language impairment in Mandarin Chinese and the development of assessment tools for the Chinese population.
