Overview
Dr. Tenenbaum is a psychologist and researcher who specializes in language acquisition and cognitive development. Her research and clinical interests focus on communication between children and their caregivers in the context of atypical development.
Dr. Tenenbaum uses eye tracking and other behavioral measures to study typical and atypical trajectories of social attention and language learning. Her work has focused on relations between social attention and word learning, communicative capacity in minimally verbal children with autism, and audio-visual synchrony processing in children with autism. Dr. Tenenbaum has also worked on questions of infant mental health and perinatal depression as it relates to language and cognitive development.
Dr. Tenenbaum completed her PhD in Psychology at Brown University in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences. She then respecialized in Clinical Psychology at Suffolk University and completed her internship and postdoctoral training at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University.
Dr. Tenenbaum joined the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development in September of 2018.
Current Appointments & Affiliations
Recent Publications
Attentional and electrophysiological associations with executive function ability in young autistic children.
Journal Article Sci Rep · July 10, 2025 Difficulties in executive functioning (EF) have been consistently reported in autistic individuals, but less is known about the attentional and neural mechanisms driving these difficulties. We explored the associations between EF abilities and sustained at ... Full text Link to item CiteRemote Infant Studies of Early Learning (RISE): Scalable online replications of key findings in infant cognitive development.
Journal Article Dev Psychol · January 2025 The current article describes the Remote Infant Studies of Early Learning, a battery intended to provide robust looking time measures of cognitive development that can be administered remotely to inform our understanding of individual developmental traject ... Full text Open Access Link to item CiteImplementation of NCCARE360, a Digital Statewide Closed-Loop Referral Platform to Improve Health and Social Care Coordination: Evidence from the North Carolina COVID-19 Support Services Program.
Journal Article N C Med J · March 2024 INTRODUCTION: Efforts to improve population health by being responsive to patients' social and economic conditions will benefit from care models and technologies that assess and address unmet social needs. In 2019, NCCARE360 launched in North Carolina as t ... Full text Link to item CiteRecent Grants
Meeting on Language in Autism
ConferencePrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Simons Foundation · 2025 - 2028Examining precursors to language impairment in ASD via remote assessment
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Institutes of Health · 2025 - 2027Developmental Outcomes - Supplement to Quantitative and remote methods to study early cognitive development and heterogeneity in ASD
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Simons Foundation · 2021 - 2027View All Grants