She holds a B.S. in speech and hearing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an M.A. in speech and hearing science from The Ohio State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a licensed speech-language pathologist. Her research program examines the cognitive, social, and linguistic resources that school-age African American children draw upon to narrate and tell stories. She teaches courses on language acquisition, language disorders of middle childhood, and multicultural aspects of communication and its disorders.