April A. Benasich

April A. Benasich is the Elizabeth H. Solomon Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Director of the Infancy Studies Laboratory at the Center for Molecular & Behavioral Neuroscience (CMBN) and Director of the Carter Center for Neurocognitive Research and Professor of Neuroscience at Rutgers University. In addition, she is a Principal Investigator within the National Science Foundation-funded Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center headquartered at the University of California, San Diego’s Institute for Neural Computation.

Dr. Benasich was the first to link early deficits in rapid auditory processing to later impairments in language and cognition, thus demonstrating that the ability to perform fine non-speech acoustic discriminations in early infancy is critically important to, and highly predictive of, language development in typically developing children as well as children at risk for language learning disorders.[1][2] Her research also suggests that rapid auditory processing ability may be used to identify and remediate infants at highest risk of language delay and impairment regardless of risk status.[1] and she has demonstrated in pilot studies that infants who played a training game developed to encourage them to focus on small aural differences developed more accurate acoustic maps than infants who were not exposed to the same intervention.[3]

Education

Dr. Benasich received Ph.D.’s from New York University in Experimental/Cognitive Neuroscience and Clinical Psychology in 1987 and also has a BSN in Nursing and fifteen years of medical experience in pediatrics. She completed her initial postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she was a member of the Research Steering Committee of the Infant Health and Development Program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a second postdoctoral fellowship under Dr. Paula Tallal at the CMBN.

Research

Throughout her career, Dr. Benasich’s work has centered on the study of the early neural processes necessary for normal cognitive and language development as well as the impact of disordered processing in high risk or neurologically impaired infants. At NYU, Dr. Benasich studied infant behaviors, such as attention, habituation and memory, and their relationship to later cognitive and linguistic activity with Marc Bornstein, now Head of Child and Family Research at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, examining infant visual attention as a potential predictor of cognitive development.[4] In her postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins, she served on the Research Steering Committee for the Infant Health and Development Program, a large national randomized clinical trial of an early intervention program for low birth weight, premature infants.[5]

At CMBN, Rutgers, Newark, as a Research Associate with Paula Tallal, Dr. Benasich developed a behavioral and electrocortical (EEG/ERP)battery that permitted the assessment of rapid auditory temporal processing (RAP) in infancy and the relationship of RAP thresholds to subsequent language outcomes. The resulting prospective, longitudinal studies demonstrated that differences in infant discrimination of rapid auditory cues (a critical skill for decoding language) were strongly and reliably related to differences in later language comprehension and production.[6][7] At the Infancy Studies Laboratory, Dr. Benasich’s research, involving more than 1000 children over fifteen years, has continued to focus on neural underpinnings of cognitive and language development as well as the development of temporally-bounded sensory information processing (shown to be a predictor of language impairment and dyslexia in older children [8]). Her research has shown that the ability to perform fine-grained acoustic analyses in the tens of milliseconds time range in early infancy is critical to the decoding of the speech stream and the subsequent establishment of phonemic maps that support later language development.[6][9][2] Currently, the Benasich lab is studying the evolution of infant brain waves (and oscillations) as infants process the critical timing cues important for the construction of prelinguistic acoustic maps that support language acquisition.[10] Pilot studies suggest that behavioral intervention in young infants can support and enhance language mapping and rapid auditory processing abilities.[11][12][13]

References

  1. 1 2 "Dr. April Benasich: Groundbreaking Findings and Four New Papers in Press". Tdlc.ucsd.edu. Retrieved 2013-11-01.
  2. 1 2 Choudhury, N. & Benasich, A.A. (2011). Maturation of Auditory Evoked Potentials from 6 to 48 months: Prediction to 3 and 4 year Language and Cognitive Abilities. Clinical Neurophysiology, 122, 2, 320-338. (doi:10.1016/j.clinph.2010.05.035)
  3. ↑ "How Whooshes and Beeps Can Make Babies Better Listeners - The Atlantic". TheAtlantic.com. 2014-10-09. Retrieved 2015-12-29.
  4. ↑ "April Benasich | Rutgers-Newark". Newark.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 2013-11-01.
  5. ↑ Ramey CT, Bryant DM, Wasik BH, Sparling JJ, Fendt KH, LaVange LM. (1992). Infant Health and Development Program for low birth weight, premature infants: program elements, family participation, and child intelligence. Pediatrics. 89, 3, 454-65.
  6. 1 2 Benasich, A.A. & Tallal, P. (2002). Infant discrimination of rapid auditory cues predicts later language impairment. Behavioural Brain Research, 136 (1), 31-49.
  7. ↑ Benasich, A.A., Thomas, J.J., Choudhury, N. & Leppänen, P.H.T. (2002). The importance of rapid auditory processing abilities to early language development: Evidence from converging methodologies. Developmental Psychobiology, 40, 278-292.
  8. ↑ Boets, B., Vandermosten, M., Poelmans, H., Luts, H., Wouters, J., Ghesquiere, P. (2011). Preschool impairments in auditory processing and speech perception uniquely predict future reading problems. Res. Dev. Disabil. 32, 560–570.
  9. ↑ Choudhury, N., Leppänen, P.H.T., Leevers, H.J. & Benasich, A.A. (2007). Infant information processing and family history of specific language impairment: Converging evidence for RAP deficits from two paradigms. Developmental Science, 10, (2), 213-236.
  10. ↑ "How the Brain Learns - US News and World Report". Usnews.com. 2012-02-24. Retrieved 2013-11-01.
  11. ↑ Benasich, A.A., Choudhury, N.A., Realpe-Bonilla, T., and Roesler, C.P. (2014). Plasticity in developing brain: Active auditory exposure impacts prelinguistic acoustic mapping. The Journal of Neuroscience, 34(40), 133349-13363.
  12. ↑ Stix, Gary (2013-10-28). "How to Build a Better Learner". Scientific American. Retrieved 2013-11-01.
  13. ↑ "Research Highlight". Tdlc.ucsd.edu. Retrieved 2013-11-01.
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