Welcome new Specialist: Katrina Fulcher-Rood, PhD, CCC-SLP, BCS-CL
Katrina’s expertise in child language and child language disorders comes from her primary research interests as well as the areas that she teaches at the undergraduate and graduate level. Her primary research area is the diagnostic decision-making of child language disorders. Specifically, she works with school-based SLPs to determine what assessment tools they use, why they use these assessment tools, and how they use assessment data to make decisions regarding diagnosis. This work has been published across three different ASHA peer-reviewed journals as well as presented at the local, national, and international level. In addition, she served as a co-principal investigator on a National Institutes of Health grant that examined the diagnostic accuracy of various assessment tools used to diagnose language impairment in bilingual children. Regarding teaching, Katrina teaches undergraduate classes in language development, pragmatic language skills, introduction to communication disorders and sciences, and school-based issues in speech-language pathology. At the graduate level, she teaches courses in assessment principles and augmentative and alternative communication. In each of these classes she discusses in some capacity the characteristics of developmental language disorders, aspects of typical language development, and evidenced-based assessment measures for child language.