Research Colloquium 2024

Title: The overlap between speech, language and reading disorders.

Speaker: Kelly Farquharson, Ph.D is an associate professor at Florida State University where she directs the Children's Literacy and Speech Sound (CLaSS) Lab. The mission of her lab is to help children with speech and language impairments achieve classroom success. Dr. Farquharson is an ASHA Fellow, a Board Certified Specialist in Child Language, and the Editor-in-Chief for Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. Follow her research lab on Instagram @ classlab_Kelly

Topic: Children with speech and language disorders are at risk to experience deficits with various aspects of reading. Using the Simple View of Reading as a theoretical framework, we will discuss the ways in which speech and language skills are necessary for reading success. Discussion will also include the ways in which educators and parents can work to support children with speech and language impairments towards achieving their literacy goals.

Title: "Better Communication in Individuals with Deafblindess - Reports from an Intervention Study"

Speaker: Charlotta Plejert, PhD. Charlotta is a Senior Associate Professor of Clinical Linguistics and works in the Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences/Division of Speech-Language Pathology at Linköping University. Her main research area is "Atypical
Interaction" in which she conducts applied Conversation Analysis on a variety of populations that involve persons with communicative and/or cognitive disorders. Her research is largely conducted across disciplinary borders.

Topic: In the current presentation, a report will be provided from an intervention study called "Better Communication in Individuals with Deafblindess (BeCom)". The intervention was grounded in Conversation Analytic (CA) methods that were used to inform a Zoom-based intervention program directed towards individuals supporting people with Congenital Deafblindness, living in special housing. The focus of the presentation will be on the use of applied CA to inform intervention with the goal to enhance quality of life for a very vulnerable group of people.

Title: The effects of altering fundamental frequency on measures associated with vocal hyperfunction

Speaker: Nicole Houle, PhD. Nichole is a postdoctoral fellow in the STEPP Lab at Boston University. She received her PhD from New York University. She studies sex and gender differences in the production and perception of speech in clinical populations, primarily within trans and gender non-conforming speakers.

Topic: Nicole’s current research examines how changing a speaker's fundamental frequency may affect measures related to vocal hyperfunction within cisgender and transgender speakers. The results of these studies have clinical implications for gender affirming services to behaviorally modify vocal gender.

Title: Speech perception and production in childhood apraxia of speech

Speaker: Emily W. Wang is a doctoral candidate at New York University. Her research interests include speech motor control across the lifespan, with a particular interest in bilingualism and childhood apraxia of speech. She is the recipient of an Apraxia Kids Grant that is currently funding her dissertation examining lexical stress in young children with and without CAS.

Topic: Children diagnosed with apraxia of speech (CAS) commonly produce lexical stress errors. There is limited research focused on prosody in this population of children, however, despite potential negative interactions with literacy and pragmatic language. Much of the existing research examines production of lexical stress, though there is some evidence to suggest that perception may also be negatively impacted, particularly in children with CAS with a co-occurring language impairment. The present study explores lexical stress perception and production in children with CAS with and without language impairment compared to their typically developing peers.

Title: Targeting everyday language and communication in children with developmental language disorder

Speaker: Lovisa Elm is an SLP and a doctoral student in the Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences at Linköping University. Her research interest primarily concerns preschool children with DLD.

Topic: Lovisa will present her ongoing PhD project which aims to explore the connection between Swedish SLP services and everyday language and communication skills in children with DLD. The thesis consists of four studies. Study I and II both address SLPs’ views on how their own practices in SLP clinics are in alignment with children’s everyday language and communication abilities and needs. Study III and IV, focus on developing and evaluating a new intervention that depart from video-recordings of the child’s everyday communication collected by caregivers at home.

Title: Assessment of caregiver book reading: the use of a checklist to evaluate an SLP-led book reading intervention

Speaker: Karin Myrberg, Ph.D is a post-doctoral researcher working in Gävleborg County, associated to Gävle University. Her current research projects all have an applied focus within the field of speech-language pathology and within a broader scope of healthcare improvement.

Topic: Karin will talk about the ongoing evaluation of the project “Läs på recept”, a shared interactive book reading intervention, which has previously been evaluated in term of feasibility and caregiver compliance. The intervention has been implemented and spread to several Swedish healthcare regions, but the question remains if the SLP-led intervention actually affects the strategies employed by caregivers during reading. To examine this, a checklist has been developed, tested and used in a research project at the SLP unit in Gävle to assess caregiver reading before and after “Läs på recept”. Karin will give a brief background, demonstrate the checklist with some examples and discuss some preliminary results.

Title: Storytelling practices of preschool teachers and parents in the suburban areas of Colombo district in Sri Lanka

Speaker: Yashodha Hettiarachchi is a PhD student and a Lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo. She is also a Speech-Language Therapist in the Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children, Sri Lanka

Topic: The lack of standardized assessment protocols for the Sinhala and Tamil languages used in assessing narrative skills poses a challenge to speech and language therapists working in Sri Lanka. Assessments are carried out by informally translating standardized assessments used in English-speaking countries like the US and the UK into the languages used in Sri Lanka. This raises questions regarding best practices in the health service provision for children with communication difficulties. The issue is intensified by the fact that storytelling is not a key component of the preschool education system in the country. It is therefore important to understand the development of narrative skills in Sri Lankan children and to identify the language elements they include in their stories to design a culturally sensitive assessment procedure. As a first step in the process, an objective was formulated to explore the storytelling practices of preschool teachers and parents, which directly impact the narrative skills of children. A semi-structured interview-based questionnaire was used to collect data from teachers. Parent-child- dyads were observed and recorded for data collection in the context of storytelling by parents.

Title: Word definition skills in children: selection of words and scoring principles

Speaker: Kristina Hansson, PhD, is an associate professor in Speech-Language Pathology at Lund University. Her main research area is language development and processing in children, with a special focus on lexicon and grammar.

Topic: Word definition tasks can capture vocabulary depth since responses reflect the child’s perception of the meaning and use of words. They thus have a potential to be useful tools in the assessment of school-age children’s language skills. A recent study found that Swedish children in grade 2, in particular children with Swedish as their second language, had shallow knowledge of words often used in the school context. When constructing a word definition task, the first question is which words to choose, and for example considering grammatical class and semantic area. After data collection, the question is what scoring principles to follow – focus on content or form or both. These are questions we are presently grappling with when planning for a project where we will investigate production and comprehension of word definitions and how these skills are associated with other aspects of language skills and aspects of executive functions in Swedish children with typical language development (with Swedish as first or second language), children with developmental language disorder and children with hearing loss.