About Me
Erin Smolak, Ph.D., Lab Director
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of South Carolina, having joined the faculty in the fall of 2022. I am the Principal Investigator of the Child Language Outcomes and Disorders (CLOuD) Lab. My research interest is in language and cognitive development from toddlerhood through the early school years in typically developing children and children with language disorders. Specifically, I study Developmental Language Disorder, or DLD, which is a lifelong
neurodevelopmental disorder that affects about 2 children in every classroom of 30. People with DLD have difficulty speaking and understanding language for no obvious reason. The overall goal of my work is to detail developmental pathways in abilities like vocabulary, language processing, attention, and working memory throughout childhood to inform early identification and intervention methods for children with DLD.
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My expertise is in language development, DLD, behavioral methodology, and eye tracking. I completed my PhD under the mentorship of Dr. Margaret Friend in the Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders at San Diego State University and the University of California San Diego. After my PhD, I completed postdoctoral training under Dr. Karla McGregor at Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha, NE. In the second year of my postdoctoral training, I received an NIH F32 NRSA fellowship from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to fund my research on language processing in DLD - a line of research I plan to continue at the University of South Carolina.
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Links and Resources
You can access all of my papers here.
Curriculum Vitae - last updated January 2023