Past Events Category: Prosem

Ella Aldridge, M.S., CF-SLP
150 Russell Laboratories
October 6, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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As part of a clinical trial to examine the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of an eight-week lingual strength training paradigm for people with ADRD, this presentation focuses on treatment feasibility and acceptability, from the perspective of patients and caregivers. Treatment-specific factors surrounding device use, instructions, and establishing treatment relevance, as well as patient-specific factors such as fatigue and requiring assistance, inform treatment feasibility. These data can be used to inform personalized treatment adaptations for each unique ADRD patient that can enhance treatment feasibility and acceptability and guide clinical implementation of lingual strengthening for patients with ADRD.

Lily Wagner, Ph.D.
150 Russell Laboratories
September 29, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Strengthening systems of care for children with autism and their families requires innovative, community-driven approaches that reduce disparities and increase timely access to services. This talk will highlight three current initiatives aimed at building more responsive, coordinated systems across settings. First, I will describe the implementation of a novel tele-assessment model in partnership with statewide early intervention (Part C) programs, which has demonstrated early evidence of reducing wait times for autism evaluations in rural and underserved communities. Second, I will discuss a collaboration with Out-of-Home Care systems to co-design an implementation plan for autism screening and care navigation within foster and kinship care, addressing multilevel barriers faced by social workers, caregivers, and children. Finally, I will introduce a new federally funded project that seeks to integrate autism family navigation into outpatient healthcare, using co-design with families and providers to strengthen service coordination and ensure that family priorities guide implementation strategies. Together, these efforts underscore the importance of participatory partnerships, implementation science frameworks, and scalable strategies for reducing disparities and supporting children with autism and their families across the lifespan.

Dhatri Devaraju, Ph.D.
150 Russell Laboratories
September 22, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Stuttering is a speech fluency disorder characterized by repetitions, prolongations and silent blocks in speech production. Although stuttering presents as speech production deficit, the underlying nature is multidimensional involving various processes in development of the disorder. One of the processes posited by internal models for sensorimotor processing is the underlying deficits in auditory feedback monitoring. These deficits can lead to faulty auditory speech representations as the disorder progresses through its developmental course. Individuals who stutter also exhibit temporal processing deficits, which are vital for speech perception, more so in the presence of noise. Thus, deficits in temporal processing can manifest as impaired speech perception in noise in these individuals. In this talk, I will discuss a series of behavioral and electrophysiological (frequency following responses) studies conducted to understand auditory temporal processing in adults who stutter. These findings highlight how auditory temporal processing and speech perception in noise are impacted in this population, warranting further exploration of these essential processes in understanding various factors involved in development of the disorder and its effects on communication.

Stephen Ferrigno, Ph.D.
150 Russell Laboratories
September 15, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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The ability to represent complex sequences is widely considered a critical feature of human cognition with implications for language, counting, social reasoning, music, and action planning. This line of research aims to explore the nature and development of sequence representation, examine the computational mechanisms that support it, and test how these representations influence early learning. I will present evidence that both young children and monkeys can represent and generate novel strings of a hierarchical center-embedded grammar. These results challenge prevailing theories of human uniqueness and suggest that this ability may be evolutionarily conserved and available early in development. In addition, I will discuss recent work into the potential memory architectures that could underlie these representations, including push-down stacks, queues, and content addressable memory. Finally, I will discuss how the cognitive demands of sequence processing intersect with early mathematical learning, particularly in relation to common errors observed in children’s counting and numerical reasoning.

Hayley Olson, B.S.
62 Goodnight Hall
April 28, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Verbal fluency tasks are used to assess language and executive function after stroke, yet traditional scoring methods may lack sensitivity to subtle semantic impairments in milder stroke populations. This study examines semantic distance, a computational measure of how closely related words are in meaning, as a metric for analyzing category fluency performance. Using a human perception-based semantic distance bigram model, we evaluated fluency data from individuals with left- and right-hemisphere subacute strokes and cognitively healthy adults (CHA). ANOVA revealed significant group differences in semantic distance, with CHA producing more semantically scattered responses than both stroke groups. Support Vector Regression was used to predict semantic distance from diffusion imaging metrics, demographic information, and clinical variables. The demographics-only model yielded the best performance (RMSE = 2.64, R² = 89.7%). Advanced diffusion outperformed standard diffusion models, highlighting the potential utility of more advanced diffusion measures. These findings suggest that semantic distance may capture meaningful language changes in post-stroke populations and that future work should explore its clinical and longitudinal applications across semantic models and fluency task types.

Marziyeh Ostadi, M.Sc.
62 Goodnight Hall
April 21, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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In this talk, we will explore how aging affects swallowing in Down syndrome (DS) using the Ts65Dn mouse model. DS is associated with speech and swallowing difficulties, which may become more pronounced with age. Additionally, DS is linked to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), with dysphagia being a common comorbidity. Swallowing phenotypes have been observed in the Ts65Dn mouse model of DS. This presentation will detail the effects of aging on swallowing alterations in a 20-month-old adult mouse model of DS, Ts65Dn, using Video Fluoroscopic Swallow Studies (VFSS).

Se-in Kim, M.A., CCC-SLP
62 Goodnight Hall
April 7, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Human vocal folds are under significant phonatory stress. Common benign vocal fold mucosal pathologies can arise due to mechanical trauma. However, the underlying mechanism of how the vocal fold cells receive external mechanical forces and translate to cell response is hardly known. Piezo is a lately discovered family of mechanosensitive cation channels expressed in a wide range of mechanically sensitive tissues and cell types. In murine vocal folds, Piezo1 plays a role in murine vocal fold epithelial (re)modeling during development and after injury. The aim of this study was to investigate the biological role of Piezo1 in human vocal fold fibroblasts (hVFF). This study, in our knowledge, was the first to discover the Piezo1 channel protein in hVFF. In addition, the effect of pharmaceutical activation of the Piezo1 channel in hVFF on intracellular Ca2+ oncentration and gene expression was investigated. The long-term goal of this study is to decipher the contribution of mechanosignaling to vocal fold tissue homesotasis or disease development, so as to develop novel treatment for benign vocal fold mucosal disorders.

Roya Abdi, M.Sc., Audiology
62 Goodnight Hall
March 31, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Sound localization abilities are known to be immature at birth, and to undergo significant development during childhood. Despite a number of studies having been conducted at various ages, using various methodological approaches, there have not been systematic cross-sectional studies on localization abilities from childhood through adulthood. This is the first study to investigate those auditory spatial hearing abilities in a large cohort of typically hearing participants ranging in age from 5-24 years. The study was designed to assess the ability to discriminate between locations to the right vs. left of midline, in quiet and in the presence of a simulated echo (precedence effect). In addition, sound source identification was evaluated using a standard multi-loudspeaker array to measure sound localization error (Root-Mean-Square, RMS). This robust study will not only inform the maturation of auditory spatial hearing but will also provide a benchmark for the maturation of auditory function in individuals with hearing loss and with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Emily Hansen, M.S., CF-SLP
62 Goodnight Hall
March 17, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Approximately 15% of toddlers can be characterized as late-talkers at age 2. Despite a largely unknown etiology, some characteristics of late-talkers have been identified, including increased rates of internalizing behaviors– i.e., behaviors that reflect negative emotions directed inward, resulting in social and emotional disturbances such as anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal. This relationship has been attributed to the role of language in self-regulation and understanding of others’ emotions. Because preterm infants are at an increased risk of late language emergence, it may be especially informative to examine internalizing behaviors and their link to language outcomes in late-talkers who were born preterm. The current study examined the role of internalizing behaviors in predicting language outcomes from 24 to 36 months in a cohort of late-talking and non-late-talking preterm infants. Results revealed that internalizing behaviors at 24 months predicted expressive vocabulary growth from 24 to 36 months only in late-talking children born preterm. This finding suggests that mental health factors may be especially critical to language development in late-talking toddlers, indicating the need for interprofessional collaboration between SLPs and mental health professionals in serving this population.

G. Nike Gnanateja, Ph.D.
62 Goodnight Hall
March 3, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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This talk will explore the use of naturalistic/continuous speech paradigms in understanding speech, language, and hearing processes. Unlike traditional isolated word or sentence tasks, continuous speech provides a more ecologically valid approach to studying how humans process spoken language. I will discuss how this methodology reveals the dynamic interplay between acoustic, linguistic, and cognitive processes during real-world communication. Recent advances in neuroimaging and computational techniques have enabled researchers to track neural responses to continuous speech with unprecedented temporal precision. This has led to new insights into how the brain segments and integrates information across multiple timescales, from phonemes to discourse-level structures. I will present evidence showing how continuous speech paradigms have enhanced our understanding of speech perception in both normal-hearing listeners and clinical populations.