Education/Training
University of Iowa, Postdoctoral Fellow 2014-2017
Communication Sciences and Disorders
University of Minnesota, Ph.D. 2010
Child Psychology
Dr. Katherine Gordon completed her doctoral work at the University of Minnesota in child psychology, focusing on language development and word learning in preschool-age children. She completed her postdoctoral work at the University of Iowa, focusing on word learning in children with developmental language disorder. During her postdoctoral work, she became interested in how memory processes, both short-term and long-term memory, affect word learning. She is currently a research scientist at Boys Town National Research Hospital.
In her laboratory, she is focused on two key areas of interest. The first is to identify effective and efficient clinical treatment approaches for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The goal is to identify approaches to support both learning and retention of school-based words (i.e., words with abstract meanings). Specifically, she is interested in treatment approaches that foster the best post-training retention of words learned. In her second line of research, she focuses on how background noise in classroom spaces affects word learning and language processing in children with typical development and DLD. Her overall goal is to inform clinical and educational practices that foster both learning and long-term retention of taught language input.
