Naama Evanhaim

Naama Evanhaim is a speech-language pathologist, a doctoral researcher and a member of the junior academic staff in the Department of Communication Disorders at Tel Aviv University. Her work spans research, teaching, clinical supervision and consultation in the acquisition of reading and writing, school-age language abilities, and language and learning disabilities. She has been in clinical practice since 2012, and is a member of the leading team of Lomdim ba-Ma'agal, a reading intervention and teacher-training program in elementary schools headed by Prof. Amalia Bar-On.

EDUCATION

2021-           PhD in Communication Disorders, Tel Aviv University.

2014-2018   MA (Magna Cum Laude) in Communication Disorders, Tel Aviv University.

2008-2012   BA (Summa Cum Laude) in Communication Disorders, Tel Aviv University.

Master’s thesis: Syntactic and Phonological Influences on Semantic Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from Reading Homographs in Hebrew. 
Supervisor: Prof. Orna Peleg and Prof. Amalia Bar-On.

Doctoral dissertation: Effects of Frequency and Word Structure on Hebrew Word Identification: A Developmental Study Using a Finger Tracking Paradigm. 
Supervisor: Dorit Ravid Advisor: Prof. Amalia Bar-On.

ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE

2024-          Clinical Instructor, Department of Communication Disorders, Tel Aviv
                   University

2019-2023  Teaching Assistant, Department of Communication Disorders, Tel Aviv
                   University

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

2023 -        Research Manager, four-year Israel Science Foundation project led by Prof.
                  Amalia Bar-On, Department of Communication Disorders, Tel Aviv University.

2019 -        Program Coordinator and member of the leading team, "Lomdim ba-Ma'agal"
                   ("Learning in a Circle") – an RTI-based reading intervention and teacher-
                  training program in elementary schools, led by Prof. Amalia Bar-On, Tel Aviv
                  University. Since 2024, also trains speech-language pathologists as program
                  facilitators.

2012 -        Speech-language pathologist

Naama's doctoral research asks how the written form of a Hebrew word guides reading: unpointed Hebrew represents a word's morphological structure only in part, and the research examines how far readers actually draw on that partial evidence, and for which words. It combines a corpus study of the texts Hebrew-reading children actually encounter with finger-tracking experiments among adults and children.

Research interests

• Reading processes in Hebrew
• Reading acquisition
• Reading comprehension
• School-age language abilities

Evanhaim, N., & Bar-On, A. Morpho-orthographic density of Hebrew nouns encountered by young readers. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. under review.
Preprint on Research Square

Brandes, G., Evanhaim, N., Dalal-Zarotski, S., Levie, R., Patael, S., Hora, A., & Bar-On, A. (2023). The effect of a dialogically oriented intervention program on the reading abilities of struggling readers in second grade. Reading and Writing, 36(8), 2221–2249. 
doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10378-z