The Sentence-Focused Framework website reflects the collective work of faculty and students in Applied Psycholinguistics Lab, lab alumni, colleagues, and collaborators. Information about key contributors is provided below.

Pamela Hadley, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Professor of Speech and Hearing Science, is the Director of the Applied Psycholinguistics Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has been a Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on five different federally-funded projects characterizing longitudinal language growth in children developing language typically and those with specific language impairment (SLI) and developmental language disorder (DLD), (R03 DC04641; NSF BCS-0822513; R21 HD071316, R01 DC016273; U01DC017135). As a clinically-certified speech-language pathologist, Dr. Hadley’s research and scholarship has been motivated by two clinical issues: improving early identification of preschool language disorders and developing more effective and efficient early language interventions. She has developed and evaluated several clinically-relevant measures associated with the sentence-focused framework, specifically measures of sentence diversity and the tense/agreement productivity score. She has also written several papers to explain how to select treatment targets to promote grammatical development. Most recently, Dr. Hadley has demonstrated how simple strategies can be used to modify grammatical properties of adult input and facilitate children’s sentence diversity and grammatical structure.  

Several others have made substantial contributions to the Sentence-Focused Framework. 

Matthew Rispoli, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Speech and Hearing Science, brings expertise in developmental psycholinguistics to the group. Dr. Rispoli has published extensively on the topics young children’s grammatical development and sentence production. His ability to apply linguistic theory and models of adult sentence production to young children’s language development has led to innovation in the design of the sentence-focused assessment measures, intervention targets, and intervention strategies.

Jan Holt, Ph.D., Professor Emerita, Educational Administration, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, has been a collaborator and co-investigator on multiple grants. Dr. Holt has brought expertise in multi-level growth modeling to the design, analysis, and interpretation of developmental change and predictors of grammatical growth. 

Over the years, several lab alumni have made substantial contributions to individual components of the sentence-focused framework: Colleen Fitzgerald, Ph.D., on parent input properties and children’s development of tense, agreement, and pronoun case, Ning Hsu, Ph.D., on parent input properties and children’s development of the verb lexicon, Megan McKenna-Kreis, M.A., CCC-SLP, on children’s development of sentence diversity, and Katie Walsh, M.A., CCC-SLP to the effects of toy talk instruction on properties of adult input. 

For more information on the Applied Psycholinguistics Lab, visit the lab website here.