Past Events Category: Prosem

Jenn Seale, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
62 Goodnight Hall
February 19, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Individuals who use and/or can benefit from augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) can experience a variety of social barriers in a predominantly mouth speaking culture. Considering various factors (e.g., capacity, design, policy) that can impact success with AAC, this talk will explore ways in which AAC systems may be contributing to barriers commonly reported in the literature (e.g., communication rate, technology demands, expertise). Beyond technology, AAC success requires community integration and support – work evaluating these systems and targeting capacity building models to increase access to AAC services will be shared. Mixed-methods research aimed at understanding lived experiences of interacting with, and through, AAC offer an important perspective shift that can be used to inform clinical practice, product design, advocacy, and research efforts.

Katie Hustad, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
62 Goodnight Hall
February 5, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Speech and Language Development in Children with Cerebral Palsy

Heather D. Salvo, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
62 Goodnight Hall
January 29, 2024 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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This talk will discuss the investigation into the evaluation of whether preschool-age children who stutter, compared to children who do not stutter, differ in their appraisal of tasks that vary in context (i.e., speech, nonspeech) as well as stress (e.g., time pressure, constructive feedback). The study incorporated a variety of dependent measures that can be used to infer appraisal, including aspects of temperament, facial coding of emotional responses, and persistence or avoidance behaviors when faced with difficulties.

62 Goodnight Hall
December 4, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Down syndrome (DS) is the most common chromosomal condition affecting multiple systems in the body. Individuals with DS have high rates of hearing loss compared to individuals without DS. In my talk, I will present preliminary findings from an ongoing study in which we measured cortical auditory obligatory responses to low and high-frequency speech sounds (/m/ and /s/) in young adults with DS and neurotypical children and adults. I will also discuss how cortical auditory processing is associated with speech perception.

62 Goodnight Hall
November 27, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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In the last decade, graph theory has been widely employed in the study of natural phenomena. In this talk, I discuss the use of graph structure analysis to characterize discourse production among bilingual and clinical populations. I present evidence from college-aged learners of a second language, older adults with dementia and adults with post-stroke aphasia to suggest that measures of connectivity in spontaneous speech may be used to predict second language proficiency in bilinguals, but also symptom severity among clinical populations. This approach provides an alternative to verbal fluency and confrontation naming for assessing language abilities in clinical populations.

62 Goodnight Hall
November 20, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Recent studies have consistently demonstrated that adult speakers can learn to be better at producing novel sound sequences, such as non-native onset clusters (e.g., GDEEMOO) in a practice-based motor learning paradigm. While each learner’s speech responses are typically elicited following both auditory and orthographic models in this paradigm, how this elicitation approach contributes to non-native cluster learning remains incompletely understood. Motived by the fact that speakers also face difficulty in perceiving the non-native clusters accurately, in this presentation, I will discuss an ongoing study that examined the extent to which learning to produce non-native clusters is impacted by the presence of auditory models in the production training task.

62 Goodnight Hall
November 6, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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In this talk Dr. Benítez-Barrera will present recent research findings related to bilingual language development in children who are deaf and/or hard of hearing. He will use Spanish-English bilingual children as a model to provide best clinical practices for all clinicians working with families for whom English is not their primary language. He will also reflect on how cultural values as well as additional factors such as socioeconomic status and parental education might impact language development in this population. He will discuss how clinicians can embrace these values and differences to support successful outcomes. Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of bilingual spoken language development in children who are deaf and/or hard of hearing.

62 Goodnight Hall
October 30, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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The Over-the-Counter (OTC) Hearing Aid Act went into effect in the fall of 2022, making hearing aids available without a prescription from an audiologist. What are OTC hearing aids? Who are they for? How can people with hearing loss successfully use OTC hearing aids? This talk will first review the motivation for, history, and current legal and regulatory status of OTC hearing aids. Then, the challenges, particularly service-delivery and self-fitting, for OTC hearing aids will be discussed. Particular attention will be paid to our recent work in developing hearing aid gain-frequency presets that maximize coverage for the potential OTC user population.

62 Goodnight Hall
October 23, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Recent theoretical accounts suggest that differences in the processing of probabilistic events may underlie the core and associated traits of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These theories hypothesize that autistic individuals are differentially impacted by disruptions in probabilistic input relative to neurotypical (NT) peers. According to this view, autistic individuals assign disproportionate weight to prediction errors such that novel input is overweighted relative to the aggregation of prior input; this is referred to as ‘hyperplasticity’ of learning. Hyperplastic learning may have important implications for autistic children’s language development, as language unfolds in statistically constrained, probabilistic sequences. Prediction among autistic individuals has primarily been examined in nonverbal, visual contexts with older children and adults. The present set of experiments aimed to test whether young autistic children differed from cognitively-matched NT peers in their processing of probabilistic input in a variety of contexts: verbal, visual, and linguistic. Findings from these experiments and implications for theoretical and clinical applications will be discussed.

62 Goodnight Hall
October 16, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Changes to swallow function occur as part of the natural aging process (presbyphagia). Simultaneously, patients diagnosed with head and neck cancer (HNC) often experience impaired swallow function (dysphagia) as a consequence of oncologic treatment. Alterations to safety and efficiency of swallowing have significant impacts on both health status and quality of life. Yet, the relationship between aging and oncologic treatment-related impacts to swallow function in this patient population is relatively unexplored. This work aims to assess how aging may impact swallow-related outcomes in patients diagnosed with HNC via comparison of pre-treatment differences in older vs younger participants within this patient population.