April A. Benasich

April A. Benasich is an American neuroscientist. She is the Elizabeth H. Solomon Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, director of the Infancy Studies Laboratory at the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, and director of the Carter Center for Neurocognitive Research and Professor of Neuroscience at Rutgers University. She is also a principal investigator within the National Science Foundation-funded Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center headquartered at the University of California, San Diego’s Institute for Neural Computation.

Benasich was the first to link early deficits in rapid auditory processing to later impairments in language and cognition, thus demonstrating that the ability to perform fine non-speech acoustic discriminations in early infancy is critically important to, and highly predictive of, language development in typically developing children as well as children at risk for language learning disorders.^[1][2] Her research also suggests that rapid auditory processing ability may be used to identify and remediate infants at highest risk of language delay and impairment regardless of risk status.^[1] and she has demonstrated that infants who played a training game developed to encourage them to focus on small aural differences developed more accurate acoustic maps than infants who were not exposed to the same intervention.^[3]