Welcome Dr. Karla N Washington

We would like to welcome Dr. Karla N Washington (Associate Professor, Department of Speech-Language Pathology, University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2)), to the CPIN Program. Karla N. Washington is an associate professor and speech-language pathologist at the University of Toronto, Department of Speech-Language Pathology, where she directs the Paediatric Language, Learning, and Speech (PedLLS) Outcomes Lab. Dr. Washington is a board-certified specialist in child language development and disorders and is active in Canadian Institutes of Health Research and U.S. National Institutes of Health-sponsored projects. Her research and clinical interests focus on speech-language development for monolingual and multilingual preschoolers. Specifically, her research seeks to characterize language learning in typical and disordered contexts with a particular interest in understanding how the child's contextual factors (i.e., Environmental and Personal, as defined by the WHO's International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health framework) are related to their outcomes. Along with her colleagues in communication disorders, linguistics, education, physics, and engineering, she applies different methodologies (e.g., acoustic duration, fMRI) to document learning and impairment in different linguistic contexts. In her effort to characterize child language development and disorder she applies intervention designs within Randomized Controlled Trials and cross-sectional and longitudinal designs. In her current work, her focus on multilingualism documents Jamaican Creole and English-speaking preschooler's speech and language productions, including functional communication while her focus on monolingualism documents language use in English-speaking preschoolers with and without developmental language disorder.