Rebecca Neal received her Ph.D. in Child Clinical and Applied Developmental Psychology from the University of Miami in 2002. She completed her clinical internship in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University. Rebecca stayed on at Brown after internship to complete a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Brown University Center for the Study of Children at Risk (CSCR). She joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in January 2005, and became an Assistant Professor in January 2009.
Rebecca's research interests fall into two related domains. Her primary area of interest involves the identification of early markers of developmental delay in at-risk populations. Recent work in this area focuses on understanding the contribution of early social-communicative (e.g., visual joint attention) and regulatory processes (e.g., infant cry) to developmental outcome (e.g., cognitive and language outcome). Rebecca maintains a second line of research in childhood autism. Recent efforts in this area used indices of physiological regulation (e.g., vagal tone) to understand social and communication deficits in children with autism and other pervasive developmental disorders. Other recent autism projects include an examination of emotion recognition abilities in high-functioning children with autism. Rebecca has received grant support from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She has also received grant support from the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
When not at work, Rebecca and her husband, Chris, spend most of their time toting their 5-year-old son, Graham, and 2_-year-old daughter, Julia, to various parks, Biscuit Brothers concerts, and birthday parties in and around Austin.
Selected publications include:
Neal, A.R., Lester, B.M., LaGasse, Linda L., & the Maternal Lifestyles Study, NICHD, Neonatal Research Network (under review). Testing the Biosocial Model of Infant Cry: 1-month cry predicts 36-month outcome in the Maternal Lifestyles Study.
Neal, A.R., Mundy, P.C., Claussen, A., Malik, S., Scott, K., & Acra, F. (under review). The relations between infant joint attention skill and cognitive and language outcome in at-risk children.
Neal, A.R. (2008) Autism. In D. Blanchfield (Ed.), The encyclopedia of life course and human development. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Publications.
Vaughan Van Hecke, A., Mundy, P., Acra, C.F., Block, J., Delgado, C., Venezia, M., Meyer, J., Neal, A.R., and Pomares, Y. (2007). Infant joint attention, temperament, and social competence in preschool children. Child Development.
Nathani, S., Oller, D.K., & Neal, A.R. (2007). On the robustness of vocal development: an examination of infants with moderate hearing impairment and additional risk factors.
LaGasse, L.L., Neal, A.R., & Lester, B.M. (2005). Assessment of Infant Cry: Acoustic Cry Analysis and Parental Perception. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, 11, 83-93.
Morales, M., Mundy, P., Crowson, M., Neal, A.R., & Delgado, C. (2005). Individual Differences in Infant Attention Skills, Joint Attention and Emotion Regulation Behavior. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 29¸ 259-263.
Neal, A.R. Lester, B.M., Sheinkopf, S.J., LaGasse, L.L., Bauer, C.R., Shankaran, S., Bada, H.S., Poole, K., & Smeriglio, V. (2005, April). Infant cry as a marker of physiological and behavioral regulation in the Maternal Lifestyles Study (MLS). In A.R. Neal (Chair), Infant cry as a marker of regulatory development. Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Atlanta, GA.
Mundy, P.M. & Neal, A.R. (2001). Neural plasticity, joint attention, and autistic developmental pathology. International Review of Research in Mental Retardation, 23, 139-167.
Oller, D.K., Eilers, R.E., Neal, A.R., & Cobo-Lewis, A.B. (1998). Late onset canonical babbling: A possible early marker of abnormal development. American Journal on Mental Retardation , 103, 249-263.
