Robin Panneton, associate professor of psychology and director of developmental and biological psychology in Virginia Tech's College of Science, has received a Canadian-U.S. 2008 Fulbright Visiting Chair Award.

She will spend the fall semester as a research chair at the Centre for Research in Language, Mind and Brain at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Panneton's Fulbright research will focus on conversational profiles between infants and caretakers: relations to interactional synchrony, developing attention skills, and language competence. Co-investigators include David McFarland from the University of Montreal and Linda Polka and Marc Pell from McGill University. Additionally, she will co-author with Polka an invited chapter titled, "Development of Speech Perception" for a new book on human auditory development.

The Canada-United States Fulbright Program is an academic exchange that, to date, has brought together nearly one thousand experts from the two countries for focused research and teaching. Panneton's areas of research expertise include perceptual development during infancy, infant speech perception, development of attention during infancy, and multimodal integration in infancy. She is a consultant at the university's Child Study Center, director of the Infant Perception Laboratory, and has received two teaching excellence awards since joining Virginia Tech in 1989 as an assistant professor. She earned her Ph.D. in developmental psychology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

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