Past Events

Latifatu Mohammed, M.S.
150 Russell Laboratories
October 27, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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During naturally occurring social interactions, such as conversations, question-response competence, a component of pragmatics, is employed to facilitate interactions, maintain topics, and foster social connectedness. In early childhood, parents use questions to promote children’s language learning. Children become responsive to questions at a very young age, and this ability tends to increase with age. Autistic children and children with fragile X syndrome often have pragmatic language difficulties, including question-response difficulties. In the current study, we aimed to (1) evaluate the response ability of autistic boys and boys with FXS and co-occurring autism to questions during conversations with an examiner, and (2) examine the relationship between the adequacy of their response and their expressive language abilities. Results showed that boys in both groups had high rates of responding to questions. However, autistic boys performed significantly better compared to boys with FXS+ autism in how they responded to the questions and also engaged in questions that both initiated and continued topics. In children with FXS and co-occurring autism, we found relationships between their expressive language and how they responded to questions. These findings add to our knowledge of question-response competence and expressive language among autistic boys and boys with FXS+ autism.

Xin Huang​, Ph.D.
Waisman Center
October 24, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
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Natural scenes are often complex and contain multiple entities. Visual segmentation refers to the processes of partitioning visual scenes into distinct objects and surfaces, as well as segregating figural objects from their background. Segmentation is crucial for scene interpretation, object recognition, and visually guided action. However, it is still unclear how the brain represents and segregates multiple stimuli. We hypothesize that the visual system exploits statistical regularities in natural scenes to represent multiple stimuli and facilitate segmentation. To test this hypothesis, we characterized natural scene statistics of motion and depth pertinent to visual segmentation, as these cues are potent for segmentation. We found that the figural region tended to move faster and more coherently and tended to be nearer in depth than the background region. In neurophysiological experiments, we recorded the activities of neurons in cortical area MT, a crucial hub for processing visual motion and depth information. We found that the responses of MT neurons to multiple stimuli within their receptive fields tended to be biased toward the stimulus component that moved at a faster speed, more coherently, and at a nearer depth. Previous theoretical studies suggest that mixing multiple stimuli with different weights (rather than equal weights) can enhance the ability to encode multiple stimuli in neuronal populations. Our neural results revealed that MT neurons indeed incorporate this strategy, but in an interesting way: the response biases and hence the response weights for different stimuli reflect optimization for performing behavioral tasks such as figure-ground segregation, given our measured natural scene statistics related to the figure and ground regions. Together, these results enrich our understanding of neural representation and segregation of multiple visual stimuli, as well as demonstrate that neural coding can be optimized to perform essential behavioral tasks, in contrast to preserving information and efficiently using resources.

Rebecca Alper, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
150 Russell Laboratories
October 20, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
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Early language skills are critical to lifelong academic and health outcomes. Experiencing early economic adversity is a group-level risk factor for children's language skill development. However, on the individual, clinical level early interaction quality and language outcomes vary greatly. This talk will focus on examining systems- and individual-level factors associated with early language skills. Furthermore, we will discuss strengths-based approaches for supporting caregiver–child interaction, early language skills, and subsequent outcomes for families experiencing adversity.

Karen B. Schloss, PhD
Waisman Center
October 17, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
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Visual communication is fundamental to how humans share information, from weather patterns to disease prevalence, to their latest scientific discoveries. When people attempt to interpret information visualizations, such as graphs, maps, diagrams, and signage, they are faced with the task of ascribing meaning to perceptual features—perceptual semantics. Sometimes, visualization designs include legends, labels, or captions to help determine perceptual semantics in the context of the visualization. However, people have expectations about how perceptual features will map to concepts called inferred mappings, and they find it more difficult to interpret visualizations that violate those expectations. Traditionally, studies on inferred mappings distinguished factors relevant for visualizations of categorical vs. continuous information. In this talk, I will discuss recent work that unites these two domains within a single framework of assignment inference. Assignment inference is the process by which people infer mappings between perceptual features and concepts represented in encoding systems. I will begin by presenting evidence that observers infer globally optimal assignments by maximizing the “merit,” or “goodness,” of assignments between perceptual features and concepts, with an emphasis on color semantics. I will then discuss factors that contribute to merit in assignment inference and explain how we can model the combination of multiple (sometimes competing) sources of merit to predict human judgments. This work has increased our understanding of how people ascribe meaning to perceptual features, which can be used to make visual communication more effective and efficient.

Jenn Soriano, M.S., CCC-SLP
Online
October 16, 2025 @ 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
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Characterizing the impact of bilingualism on perception of the speech of children and adolescents with dysarthria

Doug Dean III, Ph.D.
Waisman Center
October 10, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
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Brain Imaging from Birth and Beyond: Using MRI to Examine Child Development

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.

G. Nike Gnanateja, Ph.D.
Waisman Center
October 3, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
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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 high 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. I will highlight specific applications in 1) hearing loss, 2) studying auditory and language development , and 3) acquired language disorders. I will conclude by discussing future directions and methodological considerations for implementing continuous speech paradigms in research and clinical settings. This approach promises to bridge the gap between laboratory findings and real-world speech processing.

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.