Ronderos, Juliana (jr4645)

Ph.D., Developmental, Cognitive, and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Houston, 2022

M.A., Developmental, Cognitive, and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Houston, 2020

M.B.A., Financial Instruments and Markets & Leadership and Change, New York University, Stern School of Business, 2010

B.S. Economics, University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School, 1998

Dr. Juliana Ronderos investigates how children develop language and literacy skills, with particular attention to bilingual children and those raised in communities that have been historically less represented in developmental research. She takes an interdisciplinary approach that integrates speech-language sciences and developmental cognitive neuroscience to better understand language-based learning disorders.

Her research is organized around two complementary areas. First, she studies how children’s everyday environments—including assessment practices, family beliefs, and home literacy experiences—shape bilingual language and reading development, with the goal of improving identification and support in schools and clinics and offering meaningful insights for families raising bilingual children. Second, she examines the cognitive and brain-based systems that underlie language and literacy, using behavioral measures and neuroimaging data to understand how bilingual experience and reading development interact over time.

Ultimately, her work seeks to advance more accurate, developmentally informed, and effective practices for supporting bilingual children’s language and literacy outcomes across home, educational, and clinical contexts.

1.     Ronderos, J., & Castilla-Earls, A. (In press). What can English tell us? Evaluating English tense/agreement measures as potential assessment tools for identification of Spanish-English bilingual children with developmental language disorder. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.

2.     Castilla-Earls, A., Ronderos, J., Jasso, J., & Hernandez, M. (In press). Characterizing the growth in utterance length, grammaticality, and subordination in Spanish and English: Bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools.

3.     Ronderos, J., Castilla-Earls, A., Hernandez, A.E. & Fitton, L. (2025). The dimensionality of language in Spanish-English bilingual children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_jslhr-23-00771

4.     Ronderos, J., Zuk, J., Hernandez, A. E., & Vaughn, K. A. (2024). Large-scale investigation of white matter structural differences in bilingual and monolingual children: An adolescent brain cognitive development data study. Human Brain Mapping, 45(2). https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.26608 

5.     Hernandez, M., Ronderos, J., & Castilla-Earls, A. P. (2024). Diagnostic accuracy of grammaticality and utterance length in bilingual children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 55(2), 577–597. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_LSHSS-23-00100

6.     Davison, K. E., Ronderos, J., Gomez, S., Boucher, A. R., & Zuk, J. (2024). Caregiver self-efficacy in relation to caregivers’ history of language and reading difficulties and children’s shared reading experiences. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_lshss-23-00067

7.     Castilla-Earls, A., Ronderos, J., & Fitton, L. (2023). Spanish bilingual morphosyntactic development in bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder: Articles, clitics, verbs, and the subjunctive mood. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 66(12), 4678-4698. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_jslhr-23-00091

8.     Castilla-Earls, A., Ronderos, J., & Francis, D. J. (2023). Longitudinal examination of morphosyntactic skills in bilingual children: Spanish and English standardized scores. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_JSLHR-22-00495

9.     Castilla-Earls, A., Ronderos, J., & Fitton, L. (2022). Can bilingual children self-report their bilingual experience and proficiency? The Houston questionnaire. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_jslhr-21-00675

10.  Castilla-Earls, A., Ronderos, J., McIlraith, A., & Martinez, D. (2022). Is bilingual receptive vocabulary assessment via telepractice comparable to face-to-face? Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 53(2), 454–465. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_lshss-21-00054

11.  Ronderos, J., Castilla-Earls, A., & Ramos, G. M. (2021). Parental beliefs, language practices and language outcomes in Spanish-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2021.1935439

12.  Vaughn, K. A., Nguyen, M. V. H., Ronderos, J., & Hernandez, A. E. (2021). Cortical thickness in bilingual and monolingual children: Relationships to language use and language skill. NeuroImage, 243, 118560. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118560

13.  Hernandez, A. E., Ronderos, J., Bodet, J. P., Claussenius-Kalman, H., Nguyen, M. V. H., & Bunta, F. (2021). German in childhood and Latin in adolescence: On the bidialectal nature of lexical access in English. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8(1), 162. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00836-4

14.  Hernandez, A. E., Claussenius-Kalman, H. L., Ronderos, J., Castilla-Earls, A. P., Sun, L., Weiss, S. D., & Young, D. R. (2019). Neuroemergentism: Response to commentaries. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 49, 258–262.

15.  Hernandez, A. E., Claussenius-Kalman, H. L., Ronderos, J., Castilla-Earls, A. P., Sun, L., Weiss, S. D., & Young, D. R. (2019). Neuroemergentism: A framework for studying cognition and the brain. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 49, 214–223. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2017.12.010

16.  Hernandez, A. E., Claussenius-Kalman, H. L., Ronderos, J., & Vaughn, K. A. (2018). Symbiosis, parasitism, and bilingual cognitive control: A neuroemergentist perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2171. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02171