Today’s Friday Feature is Cynthia Boo!
Cynthia Boo is a graduate student working with Dr. Letty Naigles in the Child Language Lab. She is currently a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Developmental Psychology division at UConn. Prior to coming to UConn, Cynthia completed her bachelor’s in Psychology at Juniata College in PA and master’s in General Psychology at The New School for Social Research in NY.
Cynthia is currently working on the “Early Predictors to School Age Language: Individual and Interactional Child and Parent Factors” project (IRB Protocol #: H18-208AARH; PI: Dr. Naigles), where she is investigating autistic and non-autistic children’s storytelling abilities. She is interested in how these groups of children differ, or are similar, in their abilities to tell stories based on books and from their personal experiences, as well as various factors that may contribute to their storytelling abilities (i.e., overall language and cognitive functioning).
Cynthia’s primary research interests are on the social communication and pragmatic language abilities of school-aged autistic children. Her current research investigates these children’s use of discourse markers (e.g., “like”, “well,” “um”) in their naturalistic speech. As a fourth-year graduate student, Cynthia is gearing up to collect data for her dissertation, which will assess the ways autistic and non-autistic dyads of friends communicate with one another as they play games in the lab (stay tuned!).
When she is not in the lab, Cynthia enjoys cooking and trying new recipes. She also loves to explore the trails all around Connecticut with her dog, Mochi. When she needs a break, Cynthia likes to whip out her old Pokemon games as it reminds her of her childhood. Her favorite Pokemon game has been Let’s Go Pikachu!
