Past Events Category: Prosem

Lukas Suveg, Au.D., Ph.D.
62 Goodnight Hall
October 19, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Spatial separation of target and competing speech can improve the accuracy by which listeners, including those with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs), understand target speech. Even if measurement of this benefit were included in clinical evaluations, behavioral metrics like percent improvement on speech identification tasks are not designed to provide insight into the momentary accumulation of perceptual salience of auditory stimuli that informs the ultimate determination of the speech target. In two related studies, participants with typical hearing or bilateral CIs identified a speech target presented with a speech masker while their eye-gaze to objects in a “visual world” containing depictions of both acoustic stimuli was recorded. These studies were designed primarily to investigate the effects of target-masker spatial configuration and spatial congruence between the acoustic and visual stimuli on certainty in target identity. Eye gaze behaviors unfolding over the time course of target determination were measured along with time to decision and percent correct, to test the hypotheses that spatial separation of a target and masker, as well as audio-visual spatial congruence, would increase the certainty by which targets are identified.

Katie Eulau, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
62 Goodnight Hall
October 5, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Duet 2.0 is a remote, caregiver-mediated, early language intervention serving English- and Spanish-speaking families experiencing economic adversity in the Philadelphia area evaluated via randomized controlled trial. We hypothesized that (1) child language outcomes, (2) social contingency, (3) caregiver developmental knowledge, and (4) caregiver feelings of self-efficacy at three-month follow-up and six-month follow-up would benefit from Duet 2.0. Participants were caregivers and their children who entered the study at 12-30 months of age. The analytic sample included baseline data from 39 dyads; a total of 26 dyads completed at least one follow-up data collection. Duet 2.0 was positively associated with only the transcribed child expressive vocabulary measure (medium effect at 3mo), but not the standardized expressive vocabulary inventory. Social contingency (large effect at 3mo), caregiver developmental knowledge (large effect at 3mo, small at 6mo), and caregiver self-efficacy (in play contexts: small effect at 6mo; in teaching contexts: medium effect at 3mo, large at 6mo) were positively associated with the intervention. This exploratory sample with low-resourced families demonstrates the potential of this intervention to impact families’ lives and may suggest the value of lighter touch interventions, which can be scaled more easily to improve access for more families.

Andrea L. Ruppar, Ph.D.
62 Goodnight Hall
September 28, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Students with complex communication needs are among the most segregated learners in U.S. schools, often placed in separate settings on the premise that they are not ready for academic content. However, observational research shows that segregated classrooms offer few communication partners, little academic instruction with lots of down time, and low expectations, while general education classrooms provide the peer interaction, academic language, and literacy opportunities that give students reasons to communicate. Guided by the least dangerous assumption, I argue that the general curriculum should be the primary context for communication instruction and describe three key features of positive school experiences and outcomes for students with complex communication needs: collaborative service delivery, curriculum-based goals and vocabulary, and preparing everyone in a school to be a confident communication partner.

Claudia Schabes, M.S., CCC-SLP
62 Goodnight Hall
September 21, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Young children with Down syndrome (DS) present with complex profiles of developmental strengths and weaknesses. For clinicians and researchers who work with young children with DS, this complexity presents a challenge: our assessment tools may capture only certain aspects of communication and behavior, while the broader DS profile can also shape how those measures are expressed and interpreted. In this seminar, I will present two studies examining two commonly used assessment tools, the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) device and the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS). The LENA, an audio recorder that automatically generates measures of adult and child communication, was worn by 38 preschoolers with DS across four days over the course of four weeks. This longitudinal design allowed us to examine the test-retest reliability of three common LENA metrics using intraclass correlation coefficients. The CARS is an observational assessment used to characterize autistic traits and is frequently used with individuals with DS. CARS item-level performance was examined using descriptive statistics and ordinal regression in a sample of 53 preschoolers with DS. Together, these studies highlight how the complex communication and behavioral profile of DS shapes both the measurement itself and the meaning we assign to it.

Alexandrea White, M.A., CCC-SLP
62 Goodnight Hall
April 20, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Cerebral Palsy (CP) is the most common developmental disability impacting motor skills. Existing literature indicates that most people with CP have a communication disorder, yet there is a lack of research describing communication participation in adolescents and adults with CP. This creates a critical gap in our understanding of how CP and its associated communication disorders impact real world abilities to engage with others. In this study, we sought to measure associations between 1.) participant-reported communication participation 2.) parent-reported communication function, and 3.) objective measures of speech intelligibility. Participants were 24 individuals (18;0-21;11) with CP who had completed a self-report measure of communication participation, the Communication Participation Item Bank (CPIB). Their parents completed subjective ratings of communication function. Results will highlight the relationship between communication function and communication participation. We will also discuss a need for further work examining participant lifestyle factors and communication contexts which might be particularly impactful for participation in this population.

John Munday, M.S., CCC-SLP
62 Goodnight Hall
April 6, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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While speech sound development is well studied, there remain questions regarding the functional impact of speech sound errors in children. That disconnect means that knowing the speech errors a child produces does not directly tell clinicians how intelligible they are. This can be problematic as clinicians often include intelligibility goals for a child with a speech sound disorder without knowing if intelligibility is truly reduced. Children who produce speech errors may be at risk of having low speech intelligibility, but the relationship and extent of deficits are unknown. This study investigates three intelligibility outcome measures (listener-rated single-word intelligibility, listener-rated multiword intelligibility, and caregiver-reported intelligibility) in 32 children with below-average standardized articulation scores. We used linear regression models, incorporating age and articulation raw scores to predict each intelligibility outcomes. We also compared relative importance of age and articulation raw score for each intelligibility outcome. Finally, we calculated intelligibility performance for each of the 32 children using normative growth curve data published by our lab. Our results will highlight how age and articulation have different relationships with intelligibility, depending on the outcome measure. We also describe the range of intelligibility performance for children with low standardized articulation scores.

Tim Murphy, Ph.D.
62 Goodnight Hall
March 23, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Altered auditory feedback is an experimental technique that makes subtle, imperceptible perturbations to the acoustics of a speaker’s voice in near real-time. With repeated exposure, participants learn to oppose these perturbations, a process known as sensorimotor adaptation. Because sensorimotor adaptation is rapid and unconscious, it could help supplement more intensive training programs aimed at improving overall speech intelligibility for individuals with motor disorders. One contributor to degraded intelligibility in motor disorders is decreased acoustic contrast between vowels. Our lab has found that as participants learn to oppose  complex perturbations that shift formants toward the center of their vowel space, they increase these acoustic contrasts. Whether speakers retain any learning after removal of these perturbations, and whether repeated sessions of altered auditory feedback may strengthen retention, remain critical questions for the technique's treatment potential. In this presentation, I will discuss our lab’s ongoing eight-session study designed to address these questions, along with preliminary results.

Bobby Gibbs, Ph.D.
62 Goodnight Hall
March 16, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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The tracking of coherent changes in acoustic stimulus features known as auditory cue binding is essential to segregating a target talker from noise to improve speech understanding. It is currently unclear how cue binding changes with variation in the fidelity of neural stimulation through a cochlear implant (CI). I argue that this gap in knowledge is a major barrier towards improving signal enhancement strategies in CIs. My lab has recently combined auditory bubbles “glimpsing” paradigms with simulations of idealized vs suboptimal CI neural stimulation to address this knowledge gap. The glimpsing paradigm reveals cues that best support intelligibility when noise is randomly attenuated in different spectral and temporal regions. I will present preliminary research that explores how speech glimpsing is predicted by the utilization of spectrotemporal modulations (important for cue binding) when neural encoding is altered (via vocoder simulations of increased spread of neural excitation). The hypothesis that increased spread of neural excitation changes the structure of cue binding needed for glimpsing speech in noise. I will show how we have tested this hypothesis with behavioral data and objective speech intelligibility metrics during auditory bubbles glimpsing tasks.

Ryan J. Burdick, M.S., CCC-SLP, BCS-S
62 Goodnight Hall
March 2, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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This job talk outlines doctoral candidate Ryan J Burdick’s background, and how his experience led to his current research program. His research interests are two-pronged, with both prongs aimed at maximizing safety and autonomy during eating and swallowing for older individuals with Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia (ADRD). Prong 1 focuses on contextualizing swallowing to mealtime, as the context in which swallowing is occurring is ever-present, often overlooked, and presents tremendous opportunity for intervention. Prong 2 focuses on improving the measurement of swallowing safety so as to improve assessment accuracy and to make the evaluation of swallowing safety more accessible and naturalistic. Combining these aims, Ryan is researching the impact of feeding dependence on swallow function and physiology (Prong 1), while working toward the development of wearable technology for individuals with ADRD that can allow assessment of feeding and swallowing to occur in a naturalistic environment (Prong 2).

Sigan L. Hartley, Ph.D.
62 Goodnight Hall
February 23, 2026 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Dr. Hartley will discuss research aimed at understanding aging and Alzheimer's disease in people with Down syndrome. This work includes patterns in cognitive, language, and functional decline and their link to neuroimaging and blood biomarkers of brain changes. This work also includes the potential role of co-occurring health conditions and lifestyle in driving variability in aging outcomes. Implications for screening, diagnosis, and prevention efforts aimed at supporting optimal outcomes in adults with Down syndrome will be discussed.