Rate My Professor Margaret Kjelgaard

Dr. Margaret Kjelgaard serves as an Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Bridgewater State University, where she has held a faculty position since 2008. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New Hampshire and a Doctor of Philosophy from Northeastern University. She also completed clinical training for her Certificate of Clinical Competence in Speech-Language Pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions. Kjelgaard maintains additional professional roles, including Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the MGH Institute of Health Professions since 2008 and Researcher in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2015.

Kjelgaard's longstanding research examines how human listeners comprehend spoken language, focusing on prosody—the rhythm and tune of speech—and its role in language processing. This interest has extended to investigating differences in prosody perception and comprehension among autistic individuals. In collaboration with MIT colleagues, she has helped develop a theory that attributes autism symptoms to atypical predictive processing of unfolding events. Her expertise spans autism, neurodiversity, language development, and psycholinguistics. Key publications include "An Investigation of Language Impairment in Autism: Implications for Genetic Subgroups" (2001), cited over 1,500 times; "Autism as a Disorder of Prediction" (2014); "Shared Neuroanatomical Substrates of Impaired Phonological Working Memory in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Developmental Dyslexia" (2016); "Autonomic and Electrophysiological Evidence for Reduced Auditory Habituation in Autism" (2021); "Altered Engagement of the Speech Motor Network is Associated with Reduced Phonological Working Memory in Autism" (2022); and "Interceptive Abilities in Autism Spectrum Disorder" (2024). With 35 publications and approximately 2,700 citations, her work has advanced knowledge of speech processing, sensory habituation, and motor prediction in neurodiverse populations.