Amanda Owen, Ph.D., Director
 When it was time to pick a major in college, I was more than a little bit stressed out because I didn't really know what I wanted to do and deadlines were fast approaching. I knew that I liked foreign languages (I had taken German and Spanish continuously since 7th grade). I didn't think that jobs like an interpreter was for me because they involved too much travel and would make having a family difficult. I also didn't want to be a translator (of books) because I thought it involved too much time by yourself working with books and dictionaries and not enough people interaction. I was talking this over with a friend and she suggested that I consider Speech Language Pathology. My first reaction was Speech Path-what? I had never heard of the field. She described it to me based on the career of a family friend who was a school speech pathologist. I signed up for an introductory class and I was hooked. |
 Christine Wholey is enrolled in prerequisite courses at the University of Iowa in preparation for her master's in speech-language pathology . She is a board-certified music therapist and received her BM from the University of Iowa in 2007. Christine hopes to continue working with children as an SLP and is thankful for her Grammar Acquisition Lab experience. |
Doctoral Student
 Shanju Lin is a doctoral student in Communication Sciences and Disorders and has been working with Dr. Owen on several research projects. Shanju's research interests include verb use and grammatical development in English- and Mandarin-speaking children with typical development and with Specific Language Impairment. She is also interested in the interactions between language and cognition by examining how children perceive and encode motion events.
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Master's Student
Whitney Achenbaugh is a first year graduate student in Communication Sciences and Disorders. She received her BA from the University of Iowa in Speech and Hearing Sciences, and she graduated with honors after completing an undergraduate thesis in the Grammar Acquisition Lab. Whitney enjoys working with children, especially those with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and Autism, and she is very interested in clinical research. |
Undergraduate Students
 Lindsey Hansen is a senior speech and hearing science major in the undergraduate program at the University of Iowa. She hopes to attend graduate school for speech-language pathology in the fall of 2011. Lindsey enjoys working in the lab and hopes to gain skills and knowledge that will help her as an SLP in the future. |
 Katelyn Holst is a senior in the undergraduate program of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa. She is also studying psychology for a minor. Katelyn is very excited and eager to learn more about clinical research. She plans to attend graduate school next fall, and her interests include working with children with SLI and developmental language disabilities. |
 Keegan Koehlinger is a senior majoring in Speech and Hearing Sciences. She has been working in the Grammar Acquisition Lab for two years now. Last spring Keegan traveled to a research conference in Madison, Wisconsin, with other lab team members and presented a poster on SLI and adverbial clauses. This fall she is starting her undergraduate honors thesis. Her project is to take a look at the grammar abilities of children who have a mild-moderate hearing loss. The end-goal is to find and articulate the language differences between normal hearing and hearing-impaired children. Keegan hopes to continue working on research projects related to hearing loss and grammar as a graduate student in 2011. |
Lab Alumnus
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 Hugo Guo completed his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Dr. Owen and is now an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research focuses on grammatical development in typical and atypical populations (e.g., children with specific language impairment and children with hearing impairment). |
