Julie Washington, Ph.D.

Julie Washington is a Professor in the School of Education at the University of California – Irvine (UCI). She is a Speech-Language Pathologist and is a Fellow of the American Speech Language Hearing Association. Dr. Washington directs the California Learning Disabilities Research Innovation Hub at UCI. She is also director of the Language Variation, Poverty and Academic Success lab. Her research is focused on the intersection of literacy, language variation, and poverty in African American children from preschool through fifth grades. In particular, her work focuses on understanding the role of cultural dialect in assessment outcomes, identification of reading disabilities in school-aged African American children, and on disentangling the relationship between language production and comprehension in the development of early reading and language skills for children growing up in poverty. Dr. Washington brings to this work a deep understanding of the impact of within language differences on development of early reading, writing and language skills of African American children. She has led several large projects funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development focused on literacy and language variation. Currently, she is working on development of assessment protocols for use with high density dialect speakers that are designed to improve our ability to measure their linguistic competence. This work is funded by the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders at the NIH.