She is Professor Emerita of Psychology in the College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell,[1] and affiliated with the Center for Autism Research & Education (CARE).
[1] She attended graduate school at University of Virginia (UVA) where she obtained her Masters of Arts (1977) and PhD in psychology (1980)[1] under the supervision of James Deese.
McCabe was an assistant professor at Southeastern Louisiana University from 1984 to 1986,[7] where she studied causal and sentential connectives, narrative development, and conduct disorder and verbal aggression.
[13] The Atlantic has interviewed McCabe as an expert on child language development,[14] most recently calling on her expertise to guide parents in quarantine.
[16] In 2016, McCabe joined MinJeong Kim and Phitsamay Sychitkokhong in their efforts to bring southeast Asian folktales to the children of Lowell, Massachusetts, which has a large Cambodian population, through the assistance of the "creative economy" grant from the UMass president's office.
[32] During this time, she also became interested in creating culturally sensitive assessments of children's language skills, with particular emphasis on reducing culturally-based misdiagnoses of deficits.
[39] Her recent book, "Chinese Language Narration: Culture, cognition, and emotion" with Chien-ju Chang[40] has received acclaim from fellow researchers.
Shu-hui Eileen Chen writes that the book "represents one of the few recent works that provides an in-depth study of Chinese language narration" (p. 95).