Elana Pontecorvo

Elana Pontecorvo, EdM is a doctoral candidate in Speech, Language, Hearing Sciences, advised by Dr. Naomi Caselli. She received her BA in Anthropology and Hispanic Studies from Oberlin College and an EdM in Deaf Education from Boston University. Her research focuses on how deaf children learn sign language. She has investigated how hearing families who are just learning to sign can support their deaf children’s language growth, and families’ experiences learning to sign. Other projects have looked at how deaf children learn a sign and a spoken language bilingually, and what language disorders might look like among deaf children learning sign language. She was awarded an NIH fellowship which supports her dissertation research investigating how early language input supports language development for deaf children across sign and spoken language.

Elana has an active grant in at the NIH Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F31): "How language input shapes ASL vocabulary development."

Elana focuses on the following topics: ASL acquisition, language deprivation, bilingualism.