Elizabeth Peña

Elizabeth D. Peña, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is a professor and associate dean of faculty development and diversity in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her Ph.D. in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences from Temple University in 1993 and is a certified Speech-Language Pathologist. A Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association since 2010, she received ASHA's highest honor, the Honors of the Association, in 2024 for distinguished contributions to communication sciences and disorders. Peña also held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from 2004 to 2005. As director of the Human Abilities in Bilingual Language Acquisition (HABLA) Lab, her research examines bilingualism, language impairment, language development, and assessment bias and measurement. She investigates how bilingual children from diverse linguistic backgrounds acquire new language skills and lexicalize conceptual knowledge across languages, using qualitative analyses to distinguish typical from impaired performance.

Peña's work centers on two interrelated areas: dynamic assessment, which evaluates modifiability and learning potential to minimize cultural and linguistic bias inherent in static standardized tests, and semantic development in bilinguals, informing test development for accurate identification of language impairment versus difference. Key contributions include the publication of the Dynamic Assessment and Intervention: Improving Children's Narrative Abilities protocol and the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA) test, designed to accommodate cultural knowledge and dual-language responses. She currently leads the Test of English Language Learners (TELL) project, funded by a $3.18 million grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, developing an online test for speech-language pathologists to assess 4- to 9-year-old Spanish- and Vietnamese-speaking English Language Learners. Additionally, she directs a $1.25 million U.S. Department of Education pre-doctoral training grant, establishing a Special Education emphasis in UCI's Ph.D. in Education program, providing five years of support including specialized coursework and community rotations. Influential publications include "Lost in translation: Methodological considerations in cross-cultural research" (Child Development, 2007), "Assessment of bilingual children for identification of language impairment: Current findings and implications for practice" (International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 2008), "The measure matters: Language dominance profiles across measures in Spanish–English bilingual children" (Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2012), and "Reducing test bias through dynamic assessment of children's word learning ability" (American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2001).

Professional Email: edpena@uci.edu