Daniel Kempler

Respected researcher, author, lecturer and teacher, Daniel Kempler is a specialist in acquired neurologically based communicative disorders in adults. He is the author or co-author of well over 100 scholarly articles, abstracts, chapters, books, and reviews, including presentations of his research at dozens of conferences nationally and internationally in the areas of aphasia, dementia, Parkinson's disease, aging, and culturally non-biased assessments. His research has appeared in journals such as Brain and Language, Aphasiology, Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, Neuropsychology, Neuropsychiatry, and Behavioral Neurology, Archives of Neurology, and Journal of Speech and Hearing Research. In addition to research articles, Kempler is the author of the book Neurocognitive Disorders in Aging (Sage Publications, 2005).

Kempler and his colleagues have developed protocols to assess speech production, language comprehension, and memory, including: The Spanish Intelligibility Test, developed in collaboration with Zoë Hunter, is used to measure the degree of intelligibility among Spanish-speaking adults and children with a range of speech sound disorders, including apraxia and dysarthria.

The Familiar and Novel Language Comprehension Test, developed in collaboration with Diana Van Lancker Sidtis, assesses comprehension of idiomatic expressions (e.g., "He's got his head in the clouds") and literal sentences (e.g., "He takes his dogs for a ride in the car."). Kempler's publications use this tool to chart the development of non-literal language competence and document distinctive deficit profiles after left- vs. right-hemisphere damage.

The Common Objects Memory Test, designed in collaboration with Evelyn Teng, Malcolm Dick and Maribel Taussig, is a simple and culturally-sensitive recent memory test with norms from over 300 older adults from five ethnic/language groups.