Dr. Shannon Pruden is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Florida International University and is director of the Cognitive and Language Development Lab. Under the mentorship of Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Dr. Roberta Golinkoff, Dr. Pruden received her doctorate in Developmental Psychology from Temple University in 2007, where she conducted research at the Temple Infant Lab. After completing her graduate studies, she was a postdoctoral scholar for the Spatial Intelligence Learning Center at the University of Chicago collaborating with Dr. Susan C. Levine.

Dr. Pruden’s primary research interests lie at the intersection between developmental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and education. Employing a variety of methodologies (i.e., experimental and naturalistic; cross-sectional and longitudinal) and age groups (i.e., infants, preschoolers and school-aged children), her research focuses on the development of early language abilities with an emphasis on the growth of children’s spatial language and spatial cognition. More specifically, Dr. Pruden has been examining which factors influence children’s early language development, including the role of cognitive factors (i.e., early conceptual knowledge),  biological factors (i.e., child gender), and environmental factors (i.e., socioeconomic status and parent language input).

For additional information about the Cognitive and Language Development Lab, please visit the  lab website. For more information about the undergraduate and graduate programs in Psychology, please visit FIU’s Department of Psychology website. Prospective undergraduate and graduate students should contact Dr. Pruden directly at shannon.dick@fiu.edu.