Dr. Natalia Rakhlin to join CSD in August, 2014

The Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders is excited to welcome Dr. Natalia Rakhlin as a new Associate Professor starting in the Fall of 2014.

Dr. Rakhlin received a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Connecticut in 2007 and worked as a postdoctoral associate and subsequently as research faculty at the Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine. Her work is focused on language acquisition in young children, in typical development and under conditions of developmental pathology, and the factors, child-internal and environmental, that contribute to developmental outcomes. She has published papers on language development in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and Developmental Dyslexia.

One question her research addresses is how children's ability to represent linguistic structure and carry out syntactic computation interacts with various extra-linguistic cognitive capacities (e.g., working memory, Theory of Mind) during language development leading to the heterogeneity of outcomes observed in DLD. She is also interested in understanding which mechanisms that underlie human capacity for language are shared with the cognitive machinery that allows for literacy acquisition. Dr. Rakhlin is a member of the scientific advisory board for the New England Research on Dyslexia. She is looking forward to joining the academic community of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders here at Wayne State University.

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Rakhlin to Detroit, to Wayne State and to the department!