Professor, Speech/Language and Hearing | Department Head, Speech/Language and Hearing | Professor, Second Language Acquisition / Teaching - GIDP | Professor, Cognitive Science - GIDP | Member of the Graduate Faculty
Dr. Alt is Professor and Department Head of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. She is also the director of the L4: Language, Learning, Literacy, Lexicon Lab. Her research is centered on answering this question: How do people learn words and the concepts associated with those words? Her lab approaches this larger problem from three angles: 1) word learning learning the names of things) 2) concept learning learning the meanings of the words) and 3) clarifying how learning manifests in people who are bilingual. Her research often integrates these three components, and is extending findings from the lab into clinically-driven research.
The Department of Education has awarded a grant to Mary Alt, Professor and Department Head in the Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences department, for the project 'Reading Arizona'. Dr. Alt and Dr. Jennifer White (College of Education) will work together to train diverse personnel in speech language pathology and special education to better serve multicultural and multilingual children with disabilities in Arizona.
Key aspects of the grant:
- Trains scholars to become experts in evidence-based literacy techniques
- Provides interprofessional training for speech-language pathologists and special education teachers.
- Gives scholars the skills to provide culturally responsive practice to children from diverse backgrounds.
-Provides scholars with the opportunity to learn about disability and to work to design interventions free of ableism.