Christopher Sturdy
Sturdy is Professor of Psychology and Canada Research Chair in Animal Cognition, Communication, and Neuroethology at the University of Alberta. Sturdy studies songbird communication and cognition in an integrative fashion, combining several approaches to understand the biological and cognitive bases of underlying songbird acoustic communication (See the Songbird Neuroethology Laboratory website). Sturdy uses several empirical approaches, from bioacoustic analyses of vocalizations, operant discrimination paradigms and field playback experiments to electrophysiological and neuroanatomical techniques as well as artificial neural network approaches, with the long-term goal of understanding the behavioural, cognitive and neural substrates underlying songbird vocal production and perception, auditory perception and cognition.
Dave Palmer
Dave Palmer earned bachelor's degrees in geology and English in 1969, but he immediately abandoned all pretense of getting a responsible job. He stumbled on the book Walden Two and spent the next decade on a soap box talking about Skinner, trying to start an experimental community, and reading the rest of the Skinner canon. Eventually he despaired of saving the world and entered graduate school in behavior analysis under John Donahoe at the University of Massachusetts. His main preoccupation in graduate school was extending Skinner’s interpretations of complex behavior. In particular, he wondered how behavior analysis could explain memory and language, and he has spent the rest of his professional career on the same question. He is the co-author, with Donahoe, of Learning and Complex Behavior, a book that attempts to integrate behavior analysis with physiology and to embed the field in the context of the broader study of selectionism. In 2018, Palmer retired from 30 years of teaching statistics and behavior analysis at Smith College, but he continues to teach verbal behavior in the graduate program at Western New England University and will continue to do so until senility claims him. He lives on the site of a failed experimental community in Leverett, Massachusetts with his wife, cats, and chickens, his own chicks having fledged and left the nest.
Erika Hoff
Erika Hoff is Professor of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University. Her research addresses the relations among properties of children’s early environments, their language experience, and their language development. She is the Principal Investigator on an NICHD-funded longitudinal study of Spanish-English bilingual development. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters; she is the author of the textbook, Language Development; and she is the editor of multiple books on early language development, including Research Methods in Child Language: A Practical Guide and, with Peggy McCardle, Childhood Bilingualism: Research on Infancy through School Age.
Francesca degli Espinosa
Francesca gained her undergraduate degree in Psychology from Goldsmith’s College, University of London and her Ph.D. at the University of Southampton, under Prof. Bob Remington. She was the Lead Clinician for the first UK-based Early Intensive Behavioural Intervention (EIBI) outcome study (Remington et al., 2007) at the University of Southampton and within that context developed the Early Behavioural Intervention Curriculum (EBIC), an intervention framework derived from functional analyses of language to establish generative multiply controlled verbal behaviour, which subsequently formed the principal focus of her Ph.D. Currently, she runs a small diagnostic and assessment clinic in the UK, teaches advanced behaviour analysis in a number of postgraduate programmes in Italy, the UK and the US, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the B.F. Skinner Foundation. Originally schooled in cognitive developmental psychology, Francesca’s academic pursuit is the translation of cognitive and developmental descriptions of key processes in language and childhood development into an analysis of controlling variables, with the aim of deriving a technology to remediate deficits in children with autism. Her clinical and research work focuses on early social responding, generative verbal behaviour and theory of mind.
Joe Layng
T. V. Joe Layng earned a Ph.D. in Behavioral Science (biopsychology) from the University of Chicago. He has 50 years of experience in the experimental and applied analysis of behavior with a particular focus on the design of teaching/learning environments and clinical behavior analysis. At Chicago, working with pigeons, Joe investigated animal models of psychopathology, specifically the recurrence of unreinforced pathological patterns (head-banging) as a function of normal behavioral processes. Also at Chicago he contributed to the discovery and characterization of the behavioral process known as contingency adduction. Joe has extensive clinical behavior analysis experience with a focus on ambulatory schizophrenia, especially the systemic as well as topical treatment of delusional speech and hallucinatory behavior. In the 1990s Joe was Director of Academic Support and then Dean at Malcolm X College in Chicago. In 1999, he co-founded Headsprout. Joe led the scientific team that developed the technology that formed the basis of the company’s award winning patented Early Reading and Reading Comprehension online reading programs, for which he was the chief architect. The reading programs have helped millions of children learn to read. Joe has published extensively on instructional design, clinical behavior analysis, and emotions. He is currently a partner in Generategy, LLC, which publishes the patented educational software application Music Learning Lab. He is a Fellow of the Association for Behavior Analysis International, and a recipient of the APA Div 25 Fred S. Keller Behavioral Education Award. Joe serves as a trustee of the Cambridge Center for Behavior Studies, TCS Education System, Pacific Oaks College and Children’s School, Kansas Health Science Center College of Osteopathic Medicine, and is Chair, Board of Trustees, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.
Letitia Naigles
Dr. Letitia Naigles is Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut.
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 is currently Director of the Developmental Division in Psychological Sciences, Director of the Cognitive Science Program, and 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 English, French, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, German, Hindi, and Korean. 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. Dr. Naigles has been engaged for the past 18 years 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).
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 is currently Director of the Developmental Division in Psychological Sciences, Director of the Cognitive Science Program, and 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 English, French, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, German, Hindi, and Korean. 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. Dr. Naigles has been engaged for the past 18 years 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).
Michael Ramscar
Michael Ramscar completed a Ph.D. studying computational models of analogy at the University of Edinburgh in 1999. He has spent the time since trying to understand the cognitive processes underlying human communication, focusing on the discriminative nature of human learning, the way learning processes change as the mind develops in childhood, and the way these things influence the form, structure and productivity of linguistic distributions. Prior to taking up his current position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Tübingen, he served on the faculty at the University in Edinburgh (in the Department of Artificial Intelligence, and then the Department of Informatics) and at Stanford University (in the Department of Psychology).