University College London

Alexandra Perovic, Nausicaa Pouscoulous, Chris Donlan, Vikki Janke

Alexandra Perovic is one of the leading researchers in the field of atypical language acquisition in the UK. In collaboration with Nausicaa Pouscoulous, a developmental pragmatist also from UCL Linguistics, she in charge of a two-year project on the acquisition of metaphor in ASD and in Down syndrome funded by the British Academy (£10K). With Professor Chris Donlan, a UCL expert on numeracy development in SLI, Dr Perovic is investigating language and numeracy in children with ASD, Williams syndrome and SLI. She has recently completed another British Academy-funded project on the acquisition of syntactic and pragmatic control in ASD, in collaboration with Dr. Vikki Janke from the University of Kent (£10K). In collaboration with linguists, psychologists and geneticists in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, Perovic is currently establishing a research network to study language and cognition in children and adults with Williams syndrome in the countries of former Yugoslavia. The team’s research has been published in top journals such as Applied Psycholinguistics, Journal of Speech, Hearing and Language Research, Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics, Language Acquisition and Lingua.
Perovic’s lab investigates aspects of syntactic and pragmatic development in English speaking children with ASD, aged 6-16. She has access to participants via ASD units and schools in London, Surrey and Kent. Her research assistants are trainee Speech and Language Therapists with extensive experience testing children with developmental disorders.