Letitia Naigles

Email: letitia(dot)naigles@uconn(dot)edu

Dr. Letitia Naigles is Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut (UConn Child Language Lab). After earning her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, she taught at Yale University for 10 years. She has held Visiting Professor positions at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, and at the MIND Institute at the University of California, Davis. She became a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 2009. At UConn, she has been the Director of the Developmental Division in Psychological Sciences, and the Cognitive Science Program, and was the founding Director of the university-wide Kids In Developmental Science Research and Recruitment Consortium. She was awarded the Excellence in Research Award for the Biological and Life Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2017, and the Research Excellence Career Award from UConn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors in 2019.

Dr. Naigles has conducted research on language acquisition with children learning a variety of languages, including Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, and Turkish. More specifically, she has investigated when children demonstrate creativity in language use, especially language comprehension, and how they process their linguistic input while acquiring a specific language. For the past 18 years Dr. Naigles has been engaged in an intensive longitudinal investigation of the language development of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), which has innovated the use of online looking methods to assess language in this population. Her findings have illuminated which aspects of language seem to be acquired in typical fashion, and which are truly impaired, in children with ASD, providing new directions for treatment and intervention for both therapists and families.

Dr. Naigles’ research has been funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the National Alliance for Autism Research. She is the co-author of an SRCD Monograph (2009: Flexibility in Early Verb Use), co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Child Language, 2nd edition (2015), and editor of the recently published Innovative Investigations of Language in Autism Spectrum Disorder (2017).