Today’s Friday Feature is Kaya LeGrand!
Kaya LeGrand is a second-year PhD student at UConn studying Developmental Psychology. She has a BA in Linguistics from Pomona College, as well as a Master’s degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders from Emerson College. With her Linguistics degree and her passion for language, she was able to work with people as a speech pathologist. She worked at a residential school for autistic students after finishing her Master’s degree. Realizing that the autistic students she worked with (the ones with the most trouble learning language) are very understudied and that she misses doing research, she decided to go back to school to pursue her PhD.
Currently, she is working on the study Longitudinal Study of Early Language (IRB H02-415OSUBU, PI: Letty Naigles). This study follows individuals with autism spectrum disorder over time to investigate various questions related to language development in autism. She is working on a project that analyzes children’s verb production over the course of development from approximately age 2-5 to determine whether verbs are a particularly difficult aspect of language for children with autism.
Kaya’s favorite activity is to do anything outside, especially hiking and backpacking. She loves hanging out with her dog, Hugo, and playing board games!
