Dr. Jana Iverson, University of Pittsburgh Infant Communication Lab director, will present on Monday January 27th at 12:30pm in the Suedfeld Lounge. Dr. Jana Iverson’s research focuses on relations between early motor development and later-emerging ‘higher-order’ skills. She is interested in understanding: a) the way in which development in motor skills provides infants with an increasingly diverse set of opportunities for acquiring and refining abilities that contribute to development in domains such as communication and language and in which delays or deficits in motor skills can exert cascading developmental effects extending well beyond the motor domain; b) the developmental relationship between gesture and speech in children acquiring language typically; c) the extent to which early gesture-speech links are sensitive to variation in input; and d) the nature of early motor and communicative development in children at risk for Autism Spectrum Disorders.