Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Hart Hall, Room 127
BA, University of New Hampshire
PhD, Northeastern University
Clinical training for CCC, Mass General Hospital Institute of Health Professions
Dr Kjelgaard has a long standing interest in how spoken language is comprehended by human listeners regarding the prosody (or the rhythm and tune of speech). This developed into an interest in understanding differences in language processing in autistic individuals regarding prosody and language comprehension. In collaboration with colleagues at MIT, she helped to develop a new theory of autism that suggests that in autism, cognitive processing is different in terms of making predictions of events as they occur over time.
Area of Expertise
Autism, Neurodiversity, Language Development, Psycholinguistics