 Professor
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-
Madison, 1981
Child Language Development and Disorders
Email: dollaghan@utdallas.edu
Phone: 214-905-3063
Office: CD A1.11
Research Interests
Biological and sociodemographic influences on child language Validity of diagnostic categories and diagnostic indicators Models of lexical acquisition and processing
Professional Narrative
I completed my BA in linguistics at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT), and my MA and PhD in communicative disorders from the University of Montana and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, respectively. I spent the next few years at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where my research included studies of lexical acquisition in preschoolers with and without language disorders, studies of the speech and language skills of children recovering from traumatic brain injury, and a study of a comprehension monitoring treatment program for children with language comprehension deficits.
I spent the next phase of my career in the Department of Communication Science and Disorders at the University of Pittsburgh, where I became a full professor in 2004. While at Pitt it was my good fortune to be a co-investigator on longitudinal studies of developmental outcomes in children recovering from severe traumatic brain injury and in children with and without histories of middle ear effusion. I also conducted studies comparing the ability of school-age children with and without language impairments to represent and access lexical information. Working with representative samples of children from the Pittsburgh area led directly to my interest in identifying diagnostic indicators that are both valid and unbiased for children from differing sociodemographic backgrounds, and to more general issues surrounding the credibility of evidence available to support clinical decision-making.
I joined the faculty at UTD as a professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences in August, 2006. I plan to continue to focus on indicators that predict the occurrence of and recovery from developmental and acquired communication disorders in children, as well as conducting additional studies of the validity and dimensionality of diagnostic categories. Current studies include an examination of the extent to which the emergence of verb “hubs” (a small number of highly interconnected verbs) predicts syntactic growth and the extent to which within-utterance disruptions predicts certain aspects of language recovery after severe traumatic brain injury in children.
Recent Publications
Dollaghan, C. A. (2007). The handbook for evidence-based practice in communication disorders. Baltimore: Brookes.
Campbell, T. F., Dollaghan, C. A., Janosky, J. E., & Adelson, P. D. (2007). A performance curve for assessing change in Percentage of Consonants Correct- Revised. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50, 1110-1119.
Paradise, J. L., Feldman, H. M., Campbell, T. F., Dollaghan, C. A., Rockette, H. E., Pitcairn, D. L., Smith, C. G., Colborn, D. K., Bernard, B. S., Kurs-Lasky, M., Janosky, J. E., Sabo, D. L., O’Connor, R. E., & Pelham, W. E. (2007). Tympanostomy tubes and developmental outcomes at 9 to 11 years of age. The New England Journal of Medicine, 356, 248-261.
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