Research Colloquium 2024

Title: How Context Shapes Word Learning and Sentence Production: A Cognitive Load Perspective

Speaker: Huanhuan Shi, PhD. Huanhuan is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University. She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders. Her research focuses on cross-linguistic studies to investigate word learning and language production in children, both with and without Developmental Language Disorders. Her goal is to better understand the universal and language-specific mechanisms in language development.

Topic: Evidence increasingly shows that contexts affect language learning and production, partly due to the different cognitive loads they impose. These varying cognitive demands can influence children’s language performance. In my presentation, I will discuss two studies that examine the role of context on children’s word learning and sentence production through the lens of cognitive load. The first study explores how linguistic contexts shape verb learning across different languages. The second study investigates how elicitation contexts impact adolescents' production of complex sentences.

Title: Effectiveness of a Clinician Created Narrative Intervention on Spoken and Written Narratives with At-Risk 3rd grade students

Speaker: Emily Hamuka, PhD. is an associate professor and clinical educator at UNC Greensboro in the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department. She has worked in the school setting, private practice, outpatient, and University Clinic settings. She recently completed her PhD with research focusing on Narrative Language Intervention.

Topic: Narrative language skills have been shown to be highly correlated with proficient reading and writing (Kirby, Spencer, & Chen, 2021; Spencer & Petersen, 2018; Petersen et al., 2020). This study examined the effect of a Clinician Created Narrative Intervention over eight sessions. Participants included 16 at-risk 3rd grade students. Two groups of four students were seen four times a week for two weeks; the other two groups were seen twice a week for four weeks. The 2- and 4-week interventions both led to significant gains in spoken and written narratives; however, improvements in spoken and written narratives did not differ between groups. Significant gains in narrative ability can be attained by high intensity interventions as short as 2-weeks.

Title: Listener evaluations of vocal fry: methodological limitations and implications for clinical practice

Speaker: Sarah Rose Bellavance is a PhD student in Communicative Sciences and Disorders at New York University. They work with Dr. Susannah V. Levi in the Acoustic Phonetics and Perception Lab and with Dr. Aaron M. Johnson at NYU Langone’s Voice Center. Sarah’s research focuses on the acoustic and social dimensions of disordered and non-disordered voice qualities using perception experiments and automatic detection methods. They hold a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Vermont and an M.S. in Linguistics from Georgetown University.

Topic: Voice specialists have contributed to lively discussions of vocal fry (creaky voice) for nearly a century. The past decade has seen a rapid increase in perceptual experiments on the social evaluation of this voice quality, but with important limitations in some experimental designs. This talk will center on current work investigating listener evaluations of vocal fry, with particular emphasis on aspects of the listener. Finally, implications for the clinical assessment of vocal fry will be discussed.

Title: Unraveling the impact ACDF surgery on swallowing: new insights on mechanisms and anticipated recovery

Speaker: R. Brynn Jones-Rastelli, M.S., CCC-SLP, BCS-S, CBIS Brynn is a medical speech-language pathologist, who specializes in optimizing health outcomes and quality of life when normal swallowing is disrupted by disease or injury. Brynn is currently a PhD candidate in Sonja Molfenter’s Swallowing Research Lab at New York
University and her research interests are related to the impact of neurologic disease, injury, and trauma on the swallowing mechanism.

Topic: This colloquium session will examine the impacts of anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) surgery on swallowing, delving into existing research on the epidemiology and biomechanical underpinnings of dysphagia in this population. Special focus will be given to recent research findings reporting expected changes six weeks after surgery. These findings will be discussed within the context of the existing ACDF literature to explore patterns of recovery and directions for future research that are still needed.

Title: Language environment and parent-infant close contact in neonatal care and emerging lexical abilities of very preterm children–a longitudinal study

Speaker: Eva Ståhlberg-Forsén PhD, Speech-Language Pathologist, is a university lecturer and postdoctoral researcher from the University of Helsinki and Åbo Akademi University in Finland. Eva defended her thesis in 2023 on preterm children’s early language environment and lexical development. This fall she will be attending Stanford University as a visiting postdoctoral scholar.

Topic: Eva will present her research on the associations between language environment and parent-infant closeness in the NICU and early preterm children’s later lexical abilities. Research methods include day-long recordings and use of eye-tracking for lexical processing.

Title: Understanding Facilitator Interventions in the Swedish Service “Taltjänst” (Swedish Communication Facilitation Service)

Speaker: Maria Cromnow, is a PhD student in the department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences, Division of Sensory Organs & Communication at Linköping University and a communication facilitator at the regional (Region Östergötland) county health care interpretation services.

Topic: The Swedish Communication Facilitation Service (Taltjänst) provides support to people with communication disorders, commonly caused by neurological disabilities, and their conversational partners. In this talk, a study investigating facilitator interventions, will be presented. The focus of the study was to explore 1) When do facilitators intervene? 2) When do the primary conversation participants manage the conversation without facilitator support? Multimodal interaction/ Conversation analytical methods were used to analyse two phone calls involving a facilitator and clients with communication disorders. One client had congenital dysarthria, while the other had acquired aphasia, allowing for comparison of the interactional challenges faced by the facilitator when addressing different disorders.