Tara McAllister

Tara McAllister is a full professor of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at New York University and director of the department’s doctoral program. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in linguistics from Harvard University before completing her PhD in linguistics at MIT. She also holds a clinical master’s degree in speech and hearing sciences from Boston University, is certified as a speech-language pathologist, and is a Fulbright France scholar.

Dr. McAllister is an expert on childhood speech acquisition in both typically developing children and children with communication disorders, and the co-author of a widely used textbook on speech development and disorders. Her academic work has been covered by international media outlets including The Wall Street Journal and Atlas Obscura. Her writing on bilingualism for popular audiences has appeared in Slate and French Morning, with a piece forthcoming in Business Insider. Her first talk related to her book, “Everything I Got Wrong About Raising a Bilingual Child,” was the only sold-out talk at the 2025 NYC Bilingual Education Fair.

Dr. McAllister has published more than 75 articles in leading academic journals in linguistics and speech pathology. Her research lab has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 2013, with additional support from the National Science Foundation and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation. She is regularly invited to speak at major universities and national and international conferences. She also directs the team that maintains a speech-learning application downloaded more than 20,000 times.