Dean of the Interdisciplinary Studies Unit

Head of the Neurolinguistics Lab

I am a researcher and senior lecturer in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics and in the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar Ilan University. Born and raised in Kibbutz Yif'at, I completed direct studies towards an MA degree (1998) in Cognitive Psychology in Tel-Aviv University's interdisciplinary program for fostering of excellence, and later graduated with a PhD (2005) from Tel-Aviv University. I conducted my postdoctoral studies at Stanford University, in which we measured changes in children's brains as they acquire reading skills. I started my own lab in Bar Ilan in April 2008. My lab studies language and reading systems in the brain using brain imaging technology, primarily diffusion MRI and functional MRI, combined with cognitive measurements. In collaboration with researchers at Stanford, Royal Holloway, Tel-Aviv University.

Research areas:

• Language and reading systems in the brain.
• White matter pathways underlying morphological processing in Hebrew.
• The neural basis of adult stuttering, training effects.
• Development of reading systems in the brain in children born premature
• Dynamic changes in neural systems for language processing.
• Developmental language impairments and their neural basis.
• Orthographic processing in Hebrew, Arabic and English.