Kelly Farquharson, PhD, CCC-SLP
Lab Director

Dr. Farquharson is a speech-language pathologist, associate professor, and director of the Children’s Literacy and Speech Sound (CLaSS) lab at Florida State University. Using implementation science, she aims to determine factors that influence how children with speech and language disorders acquire literacy skills. She has two related lines of inquiry: 1) examining child-level skills - like, phonological processing, working memory, language, and orthographic knowledge - may influence children’s abilities to learn new words, read, and achieve age-appropriate speech production and 2) working with school-based SLPs on the implementation of evidence-based pracitces.

As a former school-based SLP, she is interested in determining how these lines of work can be used to create better assessments and treatments for SLPs to use in serving this population of children. Her research is published in the American Journal of Speech Language Pathology, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, Journal of Communication Disorders, and other peer-reviewed outlets. In 2022, she and her co-authors won the Trailblaizer Award from Topics in Language Disorders.

Dr. Farquharson is an ASHA Fellow and has has been an active member of the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA) since she was an undergraduate student and has served many leadership roles at the state and national level. In 2023, she served as the ASHA Convention Co-Chair for Speech-Language Pathology, which included recording a music video in Nashville!

She is a Board-Certified Specialist in Child Language and the former Editor-in-Chief for Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. She is a 2022-24 Fellow of the Research Institute for Implementation Science in Education (RIISE).

Dr. Farquharson offers doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate courses on speech sound production/ disorders, clinical phonetics, experimental phonetics, literacy disorders, & clinical methods. Her research activities are open to FSU students who want to become engaged in clinical research aimed towards improving the classroom success of children with speech and language impairments.  She loves children’s books and her current favorite is Blob by Anne Appert (Amazon affiliate link).

EDUCATION:

2012 - Ph.D. University of Nebraska-Lincoln
2005 - M.S. Penn State University
2003 - B.A. University of Pittsburgh