Erica Kesin-Richmond
Research Assistant
Communication and Cognitive Processes Unit
Waisman Center
1500 Highland Avenue, Room 456
Madison, WI 53705
Phone: 608/263-2251
email:kesin@waisman.wisc.edu
Research Interest
My research is focused on characterizing the nature of the interaction between language development and its biological bases. Specifically, I am concerned with the relationship between language comprehension, perception, and action. I am also interested in examining language development in terms of the specific contributions of and interactions between biological and environmental factors, genetic syndromes, and neural pathways.
Current Research
I am investigating the development of comprehension in children who have been taught to apply perceptual information and action-based experience to reading novel texts. Specifically, we are exploring how this intervention can be applied to facilitate young children's acquisition and transfer of an important scientific reasoning skill. By examining the factors that support children's ability to design unconfounded experiments across different scientific domains, we hope to learn more about how an embodied approach to language comprehension might facilitate the acquisition and transfer of an abstract principle.
In a different line of research, I have been investigating the discourse participation of individuals with Down syndrome and fragile X syndrome as part of a large project on language and communication at the Waisman Center. Most recently, I have been examining the cognitive and linguistic skills among participants in our study to determine how these skills and other aspects of development predict variation in performance on pragmatic language tasks.
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