Contact
leechk [at] unc.edu
Assistant Professor
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
RESEARCH INTERESTS
ABOUT ME
I am currently an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and direct the Early Learning Lab @ UNC-CH
Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and Boston University.
I received my Ph.D. in Human Development and Quantitative Methodology from the University of Maryland in 2016.
By the time children enter kindergarten, there is substantial variation in their language abilities. The goal of my research is to understand how this variation emerges. I do this by investigating differences in the ways parents communicate with their children.
I conduct empirical and intervention research to understand:
(1) The mechanisms that help children learn language via their social interactions.
(2) Whether interventions that target increasing parent speech can improve child language development.
(3) How innovative methodological and statistical techniques can better capture individual differences in language development among diverse populations of children (e.g., lower socioeconomic status families; children with communicative disorders).