I am a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne Department of Audiology & Speech Pathology and a Clinical Linguist at Redenlab, a US-Australian speech neuroscience and analytics company. My work spans two general areas: (1) predictors and causal mechanisms underlying children's language development, including children with language disorders, and (2) automated analysis of spoken language samples in adults and children with typical language and language disorders.
See our latest publication here benchmarking automated part-of-speech taggers across 52 language varieties using a robust and transparent methodology.
I am working with the Murdoch Children's Research Institute's (MCRI) Generation Victoria (GenV) collecting spoken language samples from children in a statewide population-based cohort.
I recently completed my PhD at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) Speech & Language Group. My PhD investigated early predictors and causal mechanisms of language disorder and difficulties. I used data from large, population-based cohorts and using machine learning statistical methods to achieve these research goals. My open access thesis can be found here, and my most recent thesis publication can be found here. We developed a 5-item predictor set that can predict children's language outcome 8 years later with >70% sensitivity and specificity, and that is available for researchers to use here.
Earlier, I completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honours at The University of Melbourne, majoring in Linguistics and German. I wrote my Honours thesis on how children connect and evaluate events in their narratives. I then completed a Erasmus+ Mundus Joint Master’s Degree programme in Clinical Linguistics (EMCL+) at the University of Eastern Finland, University of Groningen, University of Potsdam. My Master's thesis was a meta-analysis on infants' language discrimination abilities (here).
I have volunteered with The DLD Project, which provides evidence-based Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) information, resources and training in Australia. We created guidelines for how to create accessible research summaries for the DLD community (here). I have worked with MetaLab, a database of community-augmented meta-analyses in cognitive development research and interactive tools for exploring them. We published a tutorial on how to conduct transparent, reproducible meta-analyses (here).