Ron Pomper

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communicative Sciences & Disorders at Michigan State University. I direct the Language Learning Lab.

I study how children learn language, including children with typical language development, Developmental Language Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder. I use behavioral responses and eye-tracking methods to measure different aspects of children’s ability to learn new words. My recent work investigates how children form detailed representations of the sounds that form words.

I completed my postdoctoral fellowship with Karla McGregor in the Word Learning Lab at Boys Town National Research Hospital and my PhD with Jenny Saffran in the Infant Learning Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I created a Shiny application to look up phonological information (frequency, age of acquisition, neighbors, clustering coefficient) for real words and made-up words. You can access it here. Note: it will take 1 to 2 minutes for the website to load, because it uses shinylive to run the Shiny application locally rather than hosting it on an external server. I am in the process of writing up a manuscript describing the Shiny application and how to use it. Please let me know if you are using it, especially if you yave any feedback!

If you are interested in learning more about Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), check out this free eBook by Dr. Jeanne Tighe and the organizations Raising Awareness of Developmental Language Disorder (RADLD) and DLD and Me.