Allyssa McCabe | |
---|---|
Occupation(s) | Scientist, educator |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Oberlin College; University of Virginia |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Developmental Psychology |
Sub-discipline | Narrative development |
Institutions | University of Massachusetts Lowell |
Allyssa K. McCabe is a psychological scientist known for her work on narrative development. She is Professor Emerita of Psychology in the College of Fine Arts,Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Massachusetts,Lowell, [1] and affiliated with the Center for Autism Research &Education (CARE). [2]
McCabe received her A.B. in Psychology and English at Oberlin College in 1974. [1] She attended graduate school at University of Virginia (UVA) where she obtained her Masters of Arts (1977) and PhD in psychology (1980) [1] under the supervision of James Deese. [3] Her dissertation entitled A Rhetoric of Metaphor: Similarity,Goodness,Memory,and Interpretation explored the idea that people's above-average memory for metaphors comes from their metaphoric structure,rather than on the quality of the metaphor itself. [3] As an undergraduate student,McCabe began conducting research on children's narratives in collaboration with Carole Peterson. [4] [5] Their collaborative work has been supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [6] and the Department of Secretary of State of Canada.
After graduating from UVA,McCabe was hired as an assistant professor at Wheaton College where she worked until 1984. [7] During this time she focused her work on metaphor,causal and temporal connectives,and narrative structure and development. McCabe was an assistant professor at Southeastern Louisiana University from 1984 to 1986, [7] where she studied causal and sentential connectives,narrative development,and conduct disorder and verbal aggression. She subsequently moved to Tufts University and the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she worked until 1993. [7] Her work at this time focused on narrative structure and development,parental elicitation and influence on narrative,preschool narrative skill-building,causal connectives,and cultural and language differences and preventing misdiagnoses of language deficits based on culture or language,particularly among Japanese,African-American,and Latino children. McCabe joined the faculty of UML in 1993,where she worked her way up from associate professor to professor emerita. [1] She established a doctoral program in Applied Psychology and Prevention Science in the Psychology Department at UML. The first cohort of doctoral students matriculated in 2016. UML awarded her the Psychology Department Excellence in Teaching Award in 2012. [1]
McCabe is the founder and editor of Narrative Inquiry , [8] which began publication in 1991 under the name Journal of Narrative and Life History. [9] She has served on the editorial board of Imagination,Cognition and Personality since 2000. [10]
In 1999,McCabe received the Editor's Award from Contemporary Issues in Communication Science and Disorders at the Annual Convention for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association for her work with Lynn S. Bliss and Zenara Covington on the narratives of African American children. [1] [11]
McCabe and colleagues' 2014 social policy report on best practices for parents and caregivers and recommendations for policies impacting multilingual children, [12] published by the Society for Research in Child Development,was endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics. [13]
The Atlantic has interviewed McCabe as an expert on child language development, [14] most recently calling on her expertise to guide parents in quarantine. [15]
McCabe has worked and volunteered to better the lives of the children of Lowell,Massachusetts particularly through their language exposure,acquisition,and development. Since 2000,McCabe has participated in the PEN New England literacy outreach to homeless children,with particular focus on the House of Hope in Lowell. [1] In 2006,she was elected to the board of the Acre Family Child Center. [1] In 2011,McCabe and Khanh Dinh collaborated with Lowell High School to explore how personal narratives help Latino and Asian adolescents explore their identity and familial ties. [16] In 2016,McCabe joined MinJeong Kim and Phitsamay Sychitkokhong in their efforts to bring southeast Asian folktales to the children of Lowell,Massachusetts,which has a large Cambodian population,through the assistance of the "creative economy" grant from the UMass president's office. [17] In 2019,the team released "A Long,Long Time Ago in Southeast Asia:Tales from Burma,Cambodia,Laos,and Vietnam," [18] an illustrated,multilingual book of folk tales to be distributed to Lowell elementary schools. [19]
McCabe has researched narrative development from early childhood [20] throughout the lifespan, [21] the role of parents in a child's narrative development, [22] how narration differs across cultures [23] and languages, [24] [12] and the ways in which narrative,phonological awareness,and vocabulary interact with each other. [25] She is perhaps most famous for her work with preschool-age children,working on interventions to encourage their narratives both at home [20] and in school. [26] [27]
McCabe,in collaboration with David Dickinson,developed the comprehensive language approach, [25] "which looks at ways that the various strands of oral and written language (e.g.,vocabulary,phonological awareness,print knowledge) affect each other in the acquisition of full literacy". [1] This is in contrast to the phonological sensitivity approach which posits that oral language comes first and creates the environment in which a child can gain phonological sensitivity (a language skill). [25] McCabe and colleagues use the comprehensive language approach to recommend that preschools emphasize vocabulary development and other language skills not as prerequisites to phonological sensitivity,but as important pieces in their own right for a child's reading capabilities. [25]
In her work on multilingual and multicultural children's development,she has worked with a diverse range of cultural and language groups. Her first foray into non-English-speaking children's narratives was with her graduate student,Mashahiko Minami;together they explored Japanese children's narratives and the role of haikus. [28] [29] Later,with Lynn S. Bliss and Tempii Champion,she began to study African-American [30] [31] and Haitian American children's narratives. [32] During this time,she also became interested in creating culturally sensitive assessments of children's language skills,with particular emphasis on reducing culturally-based misdiagnoses of deficits. [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] Also with Lynn S. Bliss,McCabe studied narratives of Spanish-speaking children. [38] [24] With Khahn Dinh and Jana Sladkova,McCabe has studied Latino and Cambodian immigrant children's narratives. With Chien-ju Chang,she has recently explored Mandarin-speaking children's narratives. [39] Her recent book,"Chinese Language Narration:Culture,cognition,and emotion" with Chien-ju Chang [40] has received acclaim from fellow researchers. Shu-hui Eileen Chen writes that the book "represents one of the few recent works that provides an in-depth study of Chinese language narration" (p. 95). [41]
Dyslexia,previously known as word blindness,is a learning disability that affects either reading or writing. Different people are affected to different degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words,reading quickly,writing words,"sounding out" words in the head,pronouncing words when reading aloud and understanding what one reads. Often these difficulties are first noticed at school. The difficulties are involuntary,and people with this disorder have a normal desire to learn. People with dyslexia have higher rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD),developmental language disorders,and difficulties with numbers.
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words,it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language,to understand it,and to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.
Vocabulary development is a process by which people acquire words. Babbling shifts towards meaningful speech as infants grow and produce their first words around the age of one year. In early word learning,infants build their vocabulary slowly. By the age of 18 months,infants can typically produce about 50 words and begin to make word combinations.
Phonological awareness is an individual's awareness of the phonological structure,or sound structure,of words. Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability and has,therefore,been the focus of much research.
Specific language impairment (SLI) is diagnosed when a child's language does not develop normally and the difficulties cannot be accounted for by generally slow development,physical abnormality of the speech apparatus,autism spectrum disorder,apraxia,acquired brain damage or hearing loss. Twin studies have shown that it is under genetic influence. Although language impairment can result from a single-gene mutation,this is unusual. More commonly SLI results from the combined influence of multiple genetic variants,each of which is found in the general population,as well as environmental influences.
Home sign is a gestural communication system,often invented spontaneously by a deaf child who lacks accessible linguistic input. Home sign systems often arise in families where a deaf child is raised by hearing parents and is isolated from the Deaf community. Because the deaf child does not receive signed or spoken language input,these children are referred to as linguistically isolated.
Phonological development refers to how children learn to organize sounds into meaning or language (phonology) during their stages of growth.
Metalinguistic awareness,also known as metalinguistic ability,refers to the ability to consciously reflect on the nature of language and to use metalanguage to describe it. The concept of metalinguistic awareness is helpful in explaining the execution and transfer of linguistic knowledge across languages. Metalinguistics expresses itself in ways such as:
Speech repetition occurs when individuals speak the sounds that they have heard another person pronounce or say. In other words,it is the saying by one individual of the spoken vocalizations made by another individual. Speech repetition requires the person repeating the utterance to have the ability to map the sounds that they hear from the other person's oral pronunciation to similar places and manners of articulation in their own vocal tract.
Masahiko Minami is a linguistics professor at San Francisco State University where he specializes in Japanese language and cross-cultural studies. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Japanese Linguistics and associate editor of Narrative Inquiry. He is also coordinator for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test for Northern California. In addition,he served as president of the Foreign Language Association of Northern California (FLANC) and President of the Northern California Japanese Teachers’Association (NCJTA).
Emergent literacy is a term that is used to explain a child's knowledge of reading and writing skills before they learn how to read and write words. It signals a belief that,in literate society,young children—even one- and two-year-olds—are in the process of becoming literate. Through the support of parents,caregivers,and educators,a child can successfully progress from emergent to conventional reading.
Katherine Nelson was an American developmental psychologist,and professor.
Kimberly Wright Cassidy is an American psychologist. She was named the ninth president of Bryn Mawr College on February 12,2014 and was formally inaugurated on September 20,2014. She had served as interim president since Jane Dammen McAuliffe ended her term as president on June 30,2013.
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is identified when a child has problems with language development that continue into school age and beyond. The language problems have a significant impact on everyday social interactions or educational progress,and occur in the absence of autism spectrum disorder,intellectual disability or a known biomedical condition. The most obvious problems are difficulties in using words and sentences to express meanings,but for many children,understanding of language is also a challenge. This may not be evident unless the child is given a formal assessment.
Kate Nation is an experimental psychologist and expert on language and literacy development in school age children. She is Professor of Experimental Psychology and Fellow of St. John's College of the University of Oxford,where she directs the ReadOxford project and the Language and Cognitive Development Research Group.
Leslie Altman Rescorla was a developmental psychologist and expert on language delay in toddlers. Rescorla was Professor of Psychology on the Class of 1897 Professorship of Science and Director of the Child Study Institute at Bryn Mawr College. She was a licensed and school certified psychologist known for her longitudinal research on late talkers. In the 1980s,she created the Language Development Survey,a widely used tool for screening toddlers for possible language delays. Rescorla worked with Thomas M. Achenbach in developing the manual for the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA) used to measure adaptive and maladaptive behavior in children.
Andrea Smorti is an Italian psychologist and professor of developmental psychology who studies cognitive and narrative processes at the University of Florence. He founded the laboratory of methods and analysis techniques of illness experiences. He is the director of the laboratory of developmental process evaluation,Laboratory in the Department of Education,Languages,Inter-culture,Literature,and psychology at the University of Florence.
Lisa Feigenson is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Laboratory for Child Development. Feigenson is known for her research on the development of numerical abilities,working memory,and early learning. She has served on the editorial board of Cognition and the Journal of Experimental Psychology:General.
Qi Wang is a Chinese-born American psychologist and Professor of Human Development at Cornell University. She is best known for her study of memory and culture. Wang is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Psychonomic Society. She is also a member of the American Psychological Association,the Society for Research in Child Development,the Cognitive Development Society,the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development,and the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. She serves on many editorial boards and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. She directs the Culture &Cognition Lab at Cornell. Wang holds a lifetime endowed chair in human development at Cornell.
Caroline F. Rowland is a British psychologist known for her work on child first language development,grammar acquisition,and the role of environment in child's language growth. Since 2016,she has been the Director of the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She holds the position of Professor of First Language Acquisition by Special Appointment at Donders Centre for Cognition at Radboud University Nijmegen. She has also been an Honorary Research Associate in Psychological Sciences at University of Liverpool since 2018.
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