Short Bio
Bonnie Levin-Asher is a Speech and Language Pathologist (SLP) and a passionate researcher who studies the development of speech, language, and communication in infants. Her clinical expertise lies in diagnosing and treating speech and language disorders in children, particularly those with Down's syndrome, cerebral palsy, and autism. Her doctoral research explored the relationship between early multimodal communication and later language development, and her post-doctoral work at Hebrew University of Jerusalem compared multimodal communication in hearing and hearing-impaired infants. She is currently collaborating with Hunter College and Rockefeller University to study how infants learn speech in both human and robot environments. Her goal is to gain insights into vocal learning in human infants by applying songbird learning models as a framework. Additionally, Bonnie teaches undergraduate courses on clinical integration, assessment, and intervention for language disorders.
Beyond her clinical and scientific work, Bonnie is deeply committed to reducing social inequalities. She founded Prosing for Gap-Closing, a social enterprise that donates the profits from her published children’s books to children from underprivileged backgrounds, and her second book (out of three), Free-Bird, was selected for the prestigious Book Parade of the Israel Ministry of Education. In parallel, Bonnie coordinates an academic initiative aimed at narrowing language gaps among children from disadvantaged populations through the development of diagnostic tools, intervention protocols, and training programs for parents and educators. She has also created a podcast series for the general public focusing on topics related to language development. Most recently, she founded Bonbon – Words Are Everything, a framework dedicated to developing educational game kits and activities for language promotion, based on her books.