Natalya Kaganovich

Joint Appointment

Department of Psychological Sciences

Areas of Expertise

• developmental cognitive neuroscience
• developmental language disorder (DLD)
• electrophysiology
• multisensory processing
• speech perception

HHS Signature Research Area(s)

• Developmental Health and Wellness

Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences Research Area(s)

• Language Science; Language Disorders and Disabilities

Biography

The main goal of Dr. Kaganovich’s research program is to understand how the ability to combine auditory and visual information develops during childhood, how it contributes to the formation of linguistic competence, and how its impairment is manifested in developmental language disorders. Her current NIH-funded projects focus on several aspects of audiovisual and visual processing in school-aged children with developmental language disorder (DLD, also known as specific language impairment or SLI) and in their peers with typical development. More specifically, her projects examine perception of audiovisual temporal relationships, encoding of single and multiple visual features relevant for speech, the ability to allocate attention to visual information, and matching auditory and visual speech based on phonemic information. The ultimate goal of these projects is to determine which aspects of audiovisual processing are impaired in children with DLD and to what extent, either individually or collectively, such impairments can predict linguistic ability. Given that most of our experiences, from infancy onward, are multisensory in nature, we need a better understanding of how different senses are combined in the developing brain in order to have a more accurate picture of cognitive development in both typical and clinical populations. Up until recently, the multisensory nature of development has been largely overlooked. Dr. Kaganovich’s studies contribute centrally to this burgeoning area of research.

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Education

• PhD, 2007, Purdue University
• MA, 2003, Purdue University
• MA, 2000, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

Websites

• Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory

Current Courses

• SLHS 227 - Introduction to Linguistics
• SLHS 403 - Psycholinguistics