Welcome!

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Callier Center for Communication Disorders at the University of Texas-Dallas, where I work in the Developmental Neurolinguistics Lab of Dr. Mandy Maguire. I earned my PhD from the Child Language Doctoral Program at the University of Kansas (KU) in December 2012. At KU, I worked with Dr. Mabel Rice with a secondary lab placement with Dr. Rob Fiorentino. Before KU, I earned my MS in Speech-Language Pathology at Vanderbilt University where I worked with Dr. Melanie Schuele. My first experience with research came during my undergraduate work at Emory University, where I worked in the lab of Dr. Laura Namy.

 

Research Interests

My primary research interest has always been word learning in typical children and children with language disorders. Through my work with Dr. Rice and my training at KU, I developed a more specific interest in verb learning and the relationship between verb learning and syntax in typical and atypical language development. At the Callier Center, I am beginning to use electrophysiological methods (EEG and ERP) to explore the process of word learning.

Selected Publications

Fiorentino, R., Bost, J., Abel, A. D., & Zuccarelli, J. (2012) The online instantiation and syntactic consequences of the constraint on regular plurals in compounds. Mental Lexicon, 7(1).

Abel, A. D., & Schuele, C. M.  The influence of two cognitive-linguistic variables on incidental word learning in five-year-olds.  Manuscript in preparation.

Conference Presentations

Fiorentino, R., Bost, J., Graebner, A., Zuccarelli, J., and Abel, A. (March, 2010). The online instantiation and syntactic consequences of the constraint on plurals in compounds. Poster session presented at the City University of New York Conference on Sentence Processing in New York, NY.

Rice, M. L., Ash, A., Abel, A. D., Lee, J. (2008, June). A comparison of children with SLI and control children on the PPVT-R and the PPVT-III: Effects of test revision on sensitivity to affectedness. Poster session presented at the Symposium for Research in Child Language Disorders at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI.

Lee, M. W., Schuele, C. M., Barako Arndt, K., Spencer, E., Abel, A., Guillot, K., Lineback, A., Rosenthal, J. & Foran, C. (2008, November). Language in infants, toddlers, and preschoolers: SES influences on preschoolers’ performance on the PLS & PPVT.  Poster session presented at the Annual Convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in Chicago, IL.

Abel, A. D. (2007, June). The influence of phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledge and phonological memory on children's incidental word learning. Poster session presented at the Symposium for Research in Child Language Disorders at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI.

Abel, A. D., Schuele, C. M., & Barako, K. M. (2006, November). Word Learning: The effect of phonological awareness. Technical session presented at the Annual Convention of the    American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in Miami, FL.

Awards and Honors

Trainee, University of Kansas, Child Language Doctoral Program, United States
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, 5 T32DC000052: Training Researchers in Language Impairments, 2007-2009

Schiefelbusch Child Language Scholarship, University of Kansas, 2007

National Institutes of Health Student Travel Award for the Symposium on Research in Child       Language Disorders, Madison, WI, June 2007

Students Preparing for Academic & Research Career (SPARC) Award, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Mentor: C. Melanie Schuele, Ph.D., 2005-2006

Trainee, Vanderbilt University, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, United States Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, H325A020009: Preparation of Speech and Language Specialists to Serve Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, 2004-2006

Summer Undergraduate Research at Emory (SURE) Program, 2002

Non-research Interests

Bike riding and watching my husband race his bike
Running (trails and road)
Playing with the dogs
Cooking and baking