Past Events Category: Prosem

Kimberly Mueller, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
62 Goodnight Hall
September 30, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Episodes of lucidity (EL) in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) are defined as unexpected, spontaneous, and meaningful communication or connectedness in individuals thought to have lost the capacity for coherent interaction due to a progressive neurodegenerative process. While evidence for ELs has traditionally been limited to case studies and retrospective reports, recent initiatives from the National Institute on Aging have spurred studies aimed at operationalizing and directly measuring ELs. Understanding ELs could provide new insights into cognitive decline mechanisms, suggest potential therapeutic approaches, and improve caregiver strategies. Moreover, documenting ELs can reshape societal views on personhood in dementia. This presentation will introduce a research framework to study ELs, including guiding principles, definitions, proposed measurement methods, and areas needing further exploration. A study at the University of Wisconsin–Madison using video observational data in a hospice care setting will be highlighted, along with the perspectives of caregivers, staff, and individuals with dementia on the ethical considerations and research priorities.

Deling He, Ph.D.
62 Goodnight Hall
September 23, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Acoustic-driven and Cross-language Effects on Neuro-behavioral Synchronization to Speech Rhythms

Carlos Benítez-Barrera, Ph.D.
62 Goodnight Hall
September 16, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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In this talk, I will present recent research on diverse soundscapes experienced across different cultures and communities, emphasizing the critical need for inclusive hearing aid solutions for underserved populations.

Adriana Weisleder, Ph.D.
62 Goodnight Hall
April 29, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Immigrant children represent a large fraction of multilingual learners in the United States. However, the literature on bilingualism rarely centers the experiences of immigrant children. In this talk, I bring together cognitive science research on bilingualism with the integrative model of adaptation in immigrant-origin children to argue that immigrant children encounter unique contexts – both at the macro and micro level – that shape their opportunities for learning language.

Jenny Saffran, Ph.D.
62 Goodnight Hall
April 22, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Infants rapidly develop from being naïve listeners, who experience language as a sea of sounds, to understanding their native language(s). How does this remarkable learning process unfold? One potentially useful source of information lies in the statistical patterns that characterize natural languages, which signal structures ranging from phonemes to words to grammatical structures. Over the past two decades, researchers have demonstrated that infants are sensitive to myriad statistical regularities in language input. Beyond merely tracking these patterns, how might infants use statistical regularities to support language development? In my presentation, I will explore the hypothesis that infants exploit statistical regularities in the service of efficiently processing information in their linguistic environments, generating predictions and detecting areas of uncertainty that merit additional learning. By learning to efficiently encode language input, infants become increasingly able to process their native language(s).

Didulani Dantanarayana, M.Sc. Audiology
62 Goodnight Hall
April 15, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Children show significant variability in outcome measures including speech understanding in quiet and in noise. Children with hearing loss show even greater variability; numerous factors can contribute to such variability, including auditory experience prior to the onset of deafness and implantation and the downstream effects of deafness, including neurocognitive abilities neural health and the integrity of the auditory system.

Sydney Hayes, M.A., CCC-SLP
62 Goodnight Hall
April 1, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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While motor impairment is the primary diagnostic criteria for Cerebral Palsy, the majority of children with cerebral palsy also present with comorbid speech and communication impairments. A range of classification tools have been developed to describe functional motor abilities in children with Cerebral Palsy, including gross motor, fine motor, and speech motor domains. Research has indicated a significant relationship between overall communication skills and gross motor development. However, the longitudinal relationship between speech motor and gross motor development specifically has yet to be explored. Using the Viking Speech Scale, a measure of speech motor impairment, and the Gross Motor Function Classification Scale, a measure of gross motor impairment, this study investigated the longitudinal relationship between gross motor and speech motor severity in children with CP as well as the nature and direction of this change over time. Results of this study such as the patterns of growth identified across these two domains, considerations for different speech and motor severity levels, and implications for clinical practice will be discussed.

Michelle Bretl, M.S., CCC-SLP
62 Goodnight Hall
March 18, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Vocal fold fibroblasts are key players in the wound healing response and yet, little is known about their normal gene expression compared to diseased expression. While fibroblasts are necessary to facilitate wound closure and normal healing, they can also take on a pathological phenotype that leads to excessive proliferation and fibrosis or scarring. Given the challenge of obtaining fibroblasts from pathological vocal folds, normal fibroblasts treated with a specific growth factor, TGF-β1, is an in vitro model commonly used to represent changes seen in scarred vocal folds. Additionally, RNA sequencing has become a valuable tool for transcriptomic analysis of cell populations to get an idea of global gene expression differences across different treatment groups. This study aimed to define differences in the gene expression between three vocal fold fibroblast groups: scarred fibroblasts, healthy control fibroblasts, and "scar-like,” TGF-β1 treated fibroblasts. Results of this research may help to identify specific gene targets to mitigate the adverse response of vocal fold fibroblasts to injury.

Laura Horton, Ph.D.
62 Goodnight Hall
March 4, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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In this presentation, I will discuss collaborative work with Jenny Singleton (Stony Brook University) and Amy Lederberg (Georgia State University) on the pragmatics of teacher-student interactions in early elementary classrooms (kindergarten through second grade) focusing on visual attention management and turn-taking strategies. All students in the study are Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH). Using a video corpus of classroom interactions, we compare teacher-student interactions during group book-sharing in ASL-signing classrooms and spoken English classrooms, describing teachers’ language use and visually anchored socializing practices. I will discuss the demands and affordances of book-sharing using a visual language and being a DHH learner in this instructional context.

Rebecca M. Alper, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
62 Goodnight Hall
February 26, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Community-based approaches support scalability, ecological, and cultural validity of early language intervention research. However, there are often unique challenges including funding, recruitment, maintaining design rigor, and dissemination. This session will highlight the strengths and challenges of community-based research, as well as strategies for reducing barriers, through the lens of two ongoing early language intervention clinical trials, KOALA and DUET.