ענבל אילון

Inbal Eilon (Sup. Dr. Rama Novogrodsky) 

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Background:

I hold a B.A. degree from the Department of Communication Disorders and an M.A. degree from the Learning Disabilities Program at Tel Aviv University.

I started my Ph.D. studies in October 2020 in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Haifa.

I work as a speech and language specialist at the special education department of Kfar Saba, where I accompany and guide the speech therapists who work in all special education institutions in the city. In addition, I work as a speech therapist in a special education kindergarten for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Current Research:

My current research focuses on the acquisition and development of mental state verbs in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Mental state verbs (MSV's) are verbs that are used to represent internal processes like desires, beliefs and thoughts (e.g., 'want', 'think', 'know', etc.), and are one of the language instruments used to describe the person's knowledge and thoughts about the internal world of himself and others. MSV's start to appear in the language of typically developing children toward the end of the second year of life and the beginning of the third one and continues to develop during childhood.

The first aim of the current study is to describe the acquisition of MSV's in children with Autism compared to typically developing children. Additionally, we will test the influence of different contexts on the use of MSV's within the same participants (e.g., spontaneous speech, narrative and sentence completing), compare the understanding and production of these verbs and examine the connection between all the aspects of MSV's and the development of theory of mind.     

Interests:

Communication abilities, ASD, Theory of Mind, Mental language, Language abilities.

Recent conferences:

Eilon, I., & Gev, T. (2018). Creating communication that promotes development in parent-child treatment in kindergartens for children with autism through the Early Start Denver Model. The 54th annual conference of The Israeli Speech Hearing and Language Association (ISHLA), Tel-Aviv, Israel.

Eilon, I., Balaban, N., & Friedmann, N. (2014). The Influence of the Impairment in Theory of Mind on the Linguistic Abilities of Children with ASD. The 50th annual conference of The Israeli Speech Hearing and Language Association (ISHLA), Tel-Aviv, Israel.