Mihaela Barokova

I am a PhD candidate in the Developmental Science program at BU. My research examines the language and communication of children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. I am currently working on my dissertation project, which focuses on assessing the language abilities of traditionally under-represented populations in the field of autism research, namely minimally to low-verbal adolescents and non-Western, non-English speaking preschoolers with autism.

With the support of the Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship awarded by BU, I am currently conducting a study in my home country, Bulgaria, examining the expressive language and communication of typically developing children and children with autism there.

At CARE, I am also involved with the Eliciting Language Samples for Analysis (ELSA) project. As part of this study, I work on developing measures for assessing change in the expressive language of minimally-verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder.