We are pleased to announce the Invited Speakers for the 2010 SRCLD.

Arturo Hernandez, Ph.D., is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience graduate program at the University of Houston. He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Psychology from the University of California, San Diego in 1996 working with Elizabeth Bates. He spent the following year in a post-doc with Marta Kutas, also at UCSD acquiring additional expertise in Neuroimaging methods. His major research interest is in the neural underpinnings of bilingual language processing and second language acquisition. He has used a variety of neuroimaging methods as well as behavioral techniques to investigate these phenomena which have been published in a number of peer reviewed journal articles. His research is currently funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development. He has also received awards from the National Science Foundation to spend a year at the Max Planck Institute for Mind and Brain in Leipzig, Germany. More recently, he was awarded a 9 month fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. During this time, he investigated language processing in early child bilinguals using Near Infrared Spectroscopy and Event-related Potentials in collaboration with Professor Isabell Wartenburger and Arno Villringer at the Charite Medical University in Berlin, Germany. Hernandez interest in language learning has also been informed by having learned four languages at various points during his life. He learned Spanish and English simultaneously as a child, spending the school year at home in California and each summer in Mexico. At the age of 20, he spent two years in Brazil during which he became fluent in Portuguese. His more recent visits to Germany have the added benefit of lending personal insight into language learning well beyond the college years.

Laura Justice, Ph.D., is a clinical speech-language pathologist and applied researcher in early childhood language and literacy development, communication disorders, and educational interventions at The Ohio State University. Her current interests primarily concern multi-level influences on language and literacy development in high-risk populations, to include both malleable factors (e.g., quality of instruction in preschool classrooms) and non-malleable factors (e.g., children’s temperament). Dr. Justice is Professor in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University, where she also directs the Preschool Language and Literacy Lab, a research unit within the School of Teaching and Learning. Dr. Justice’s research activities have been supported by grants from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation, the International Reading Association, the National Institutes of Health, and the U. S. Department of Education. Her research on early language and literacy has received awards from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (Editor’s Award, American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology), the Council for Exceptional Children (Early Career Publication Award), and the U.S. President (Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering). She has published more than 100 articles, chapters, and reports concerning early education and language/literacy intervention and has authored or edited ten books, including Language Development from Theory to Practice; Communication Disorders: A Contemporary Perspective; and Scaffolding with Storybooks. Justice was the Founding Editor of EBP Briefs, published by Pearson, and is currently the Editor of the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.

Mabel L. Rice, Ph.D., is the Fred & Virginia Merrill Distinguished Professor of Advanced Studies at the University of Kansas. She directs the Merrill Advanced Studies Center, the Child Language Doctoral Program, and the NIDCD-funded Center for Biobehavioral Neurosciences of Communication Disorders. She has been a Scholar-in-Residence at MIT, Harvard, the University of Potsdam, German, and Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and a Japan Fellow in Tokyo. She serves on the Advisory Council of NIDCD, on the Communication Disorders Workgroup for American Psychiatric Association DSM-V, is a consultant for the Norwegian Institute of Public Health Longitudinal Study of Child Health Outcomes, and the Autism Speaks Treatment Advisory Board. She is a Fellow of AAAS and APA and received ASHA Honors as well as the Alfred A. Kawana Council of Editors Award of ASHA. Her research interests focus on language acquisition and language impairments, morphosyntax (grammar markers of language impairment), genetics of language, reading, and speech impairments, language acquisition and impairments in twins, language impairments in children affected by HIV, language impairments in children with autism, and language impairments in bilingual children. Her investigations are funded by awards from NIH. She enjoys and appreciates the support and contributions of scientific collaborators from Nebraska (Shelley Smith and Lesa Hoffman), Australia (Steve Zubrick and Kate Taylor), Spain (Javier Gayán), Johns Hopkins (Rebecca Landa), Tulane (Russ Van Dyke), University of Illinois (Ken Rich), Canada (Johanne Paradis and Martha Crago) and Norway (Synnve (Synnve.Schjolberg) and the members of the Language Acquisition Studies lab at the University of Kansas.
Web Site: http://www2.ku.edu/~cldp/MabelRice/

Jennifer Windsor, Ph.D., is Professor of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses primarily on the nonlinguistic cognitive profiles of school-age children with specific or primary language impairment. Dr. Windsor is a former Associate Editor for the Journal of Speech-Language-Hearing Research and the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, and she serves on the editorial/review boards for numerous journals and grant agencies. She was named a 2007-2010 Scholar of the College of Liberal Arts and a 2009 Erasmus Mundus Scholar.

Paul Yoder, Ph.D., is a Professor of Special Education, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University and an Investigator at Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, Vanderbilt University. He has been studying the relative efficacy of language interventions for over 23 years. Much of this work has attempted to identify which aspects of children we should use to select among treatment options. Preschoolers with SLI are very heterogeneous. They do not all respond to a particular treatment method. If we could identify the child characteristics on which they vary that also affect treatment uptake, we could probably do a better job of matching the treatment method to the child's abilities and disabilities. One candidate for such a child characteristic is typicality of speech processing. In the last 10 years, Yoder has been using event related potential (ERPs) to attempt to measure speech differentiation. In his experience, behavioral measures of speech differentiation are insufficiently sensitive to the types of individual differences in preschoolers with disabilities that predict differential response to grammatical treatment methods. Only in the last year has he been convinced that ERPs hold great promise for helping us select among grammatical treatment options for preschoolers with SLI.