Ola Ozernov-Palchik, Ph.D.

Dr. Ola Ozernov-Palchik is a Research Assistant Professor at Boston University's Wheelock College of Education and Human Development and core faculty at the AI and Education Initiative. She is also a Research Scientist at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Dr. Ozernov-Palchik's multi-disciplinary research centers on the cognitive neuroscience of language and literacy development, with a strong emphasis on translational work aimed at advancing learning for all students and promoting educational equity. Her recent line of research includes harnessing and advancing AI to create effective, personalized, and scalable tools for literacy.

Ongoing Projects:

Conversational AI for Vocabulary Development and Educational Equity

Vocabulary knowledge is the single best predictor of reading achievement and school completion. Young children vary in their vocabulary knowledge before the first day of kindergarten due to sociodemographic and developmental factors. Traditional educational approaches have failed to close these gaps, perhaps because they do not adapt to children's individual knowledge in a scalable fashion. We are developing and piloting a speech-based AI avatar designed to deliver tailored educational content in real-time. This avatar utilizes advanced NLP to engage children in interactive vocabulary teaching, adapting its responses to each child's progress. This platform is grounded in robust scientific research on how children learn language and is adapted from a randomized controlled trial conducted in the lab, which demonstrated its effectiveness in supporting children’s vocabulary learning (Ozernov-Palchik, Olson, et al., 2023; Olson, Ozernov-Palchik et al., under review).

Neurocognitive Basis of Reading Comprehension in Children with/without Dyslexia

Developmental dyslexia affects 10-12% of all children and is a deficit in accurate or fluent word decoding. Many children with dyslexia continue to struggle with reading comprehension, the overall goal of reading, even after their decoding skills have been normalized, but little is known about the neurocognitive basis of impaired comprehension in dyslexia. Using a combination of neuroimaging and behavioral measures, this project investigates the components of reading comprehension in children with dyslexia in second and third grade, the earliest point at which dyslexia can be reliably identified. Our first paper from this project investigated the developmental trajectory of language lateralization, demonstrating that the language system is already left-lateralized by age 4, using cutting-edge fMRI approaches on large-scale datasets, and challenges the view that the language system is initially bilateral during early development.

Domain-Specific and General Learning Processes in Literacy Development and Dyslexia

This research focuses on understanding the learning mechanisms that support literacy development and the specific deficits that contribute to phonological impairments in developmental dyslexia. While individuals with developmental dyslexia exhibit broader perceptual deficits in the auditory domain, their implicit learning deficits are particularly pronounced in the linguistic domain, such as in speech perception. My work, using psycholinguistic, procedural learning, and statistical learning experiments, reveals that individuals with dyslexia struggle with speech-specific perceptual adaptation and exhibit impaired neural representation of speech sounds. However, these deficits do not extend to non-linguistic auditory processing, such as tones. Interestingly, despite these challenges, individuals with dyslexia often achieve typical oral language, pointing to domain-specific learning abilities.