Leonard Abbeduto

Leonard Abbeduto is a psychologist known for his research on individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders, including Fragile X syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, and Down syndrome, and factors that influence their linguistic development over the lifespan. He is the Tsakopoulos-Vismara Endowed Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at University of California, Davis. He serves as director of research at the Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopment Disorders (MIND) Institute, In 2010, Abbeduto received the Enid and William Rosen Research Award from the National Fragile X Foundation. and Guide to Human Development for Future Educators. He co-authored Language and Communication in Mental Retardation: Development, Processes and Intervention, with Sheldon Rosenberg. A review, published by the Linguistic Society of America, acknowledges the complexity of research on language development in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders and describes the book as valuable and useful to the field. Abbeduto's dissertation was titled Syntactic and semantic influences on the motor programming of speech: Developmental differences and similarities.

Earlier in his career, Abbeduto served as Chair of the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Abbeduto's research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1985, These awards have allowed Abbeduto to conduct research using expressive language sampling to gain information on the linguistic development of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. In other early research, Abbeduto examined the conversational skills of adults with mild intellectual disability, focusing on the use of grammatical morphemes and complex sentence constructions as measures of language competence. His research indicated positive trajectories in the linguistic development of individuals with intellectually disabilities.

Still early in his career, Abbeduto began researching the communicative and linguistic impairments associated with Fragile X syndrome and the potential opportunities for intervention with this population. He has contributed to research on Fragile X syndrome, not only by focusing on communication and language development, but also by studying the development of social avoidance through longitudinal studies. Abbeduto and his colleagues discovered that social avoidance, which is common in individuals with Fragile X syndrome, increases during childhood but then levels off during adulthood.

Abbeduto found that there are important clinical differences between autism and Fragile X syndrome, which have implications for treatment.

Representative publications