Research Colloquium 2023

Title: Words don’t come easy – decoding and reading comprehension difficulties in adolescents with intellectual disability

Karin Nilsson, PhD, is a speech and language pathologist with an interest in reading. She is currently working as a post doc at the disability research division, at Linköping University. Her research interest involves reading and language in individuals with intellectual disability (ID).

Karin will present her thesis work where she investigated the development and the concurrent predictors of reading comprehension and decoding in Swedish adolescents with ID. She will also touch upon a publication about semantic networks in the same population.

Title: The Comparative Effects of Representation in the Acquisition of Verb Vocabulary in School-Aged Minimally-Speaking Autistic Children: A Brainstorming Session

Grace Clark, M.S., CCC-SLP is a doctoral candidate mentored by Dr. Christina Reuterskiöld in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at NYU. Her research interests include improving the quality of life and communicative competence of minimally speaking school-age autistic children through the use of augmentative and alternative communication.

We know that minimally-speaking school-age autistic children can benefit from orthographic support during word learning tasks. What does this mean for the design of augmentative and alternative communication apps? The proposed study compares the expressive communication of newly taught verbs across three representation conditions: video alone, text alone, and video plus paired text.

Title: Language intervention in multilingual children with DLD.

Vishnu KK Nair, PhD, is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at University of Reading. He completed a PhD in cognitive
science from Macquarie University in 2016 and a post-doctoral fellowship from New York University in 2020. Vishnu's current research focuses on the intersection between
multilingualism, race and disability. He is particularly interested in examining service delivery issues in children from racially and culturally minoritized families.

This talk will summarize the results of a recent systematic review on language intervention in bilingual children with DLD. The review aimed at synthesizing and critically analyzing intervention evidence targeting six areas of language. In addition to presenting intervention evidence, the talk will provide an overview of the effects of cross-language generalization in these domains.

Title: Priming the Production of Relative Clause Production in Monolingual and Bilingual Children

Linye Jing, PhD. is a postdoctoral researcher in the Developing Language and Literacy lab at Teachers College, Columbia University. She recently received her doctoral degree in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at NYU. Her research interests are language development and disorders in bilingual and monolingual children. Her dissertation investigated the production of relative clauses in bilingual Mandarin-English speaking children.

Relative clause (RC) production is an important language milestone for children. Incorporating a felicitous context when assessing RC production is of theoretical and clinical value. This study investigated how a felicitous context influenced elicited production of RCs from monolingual English-speaking and bilingual Mandarin-English speaking children between the ages of five to seven. Results corroborate emerging research findings suggesting that the production of complex sentences is an area of strength in bilingual Mandarin-English-speaking children and could potentially be used to identify DLD in this population.

Title: Individual differences in semantic processing: the impact of taxonomic and thematic relationships on language production

Stacey Rimikis, Ph.D., CCC-SLP is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders and Director of the Masters of Science Program. As a clinician and educator, Dr. Rimikis’s expertise centers on acquired neurogenic communication disorders, including aphasia and neurocognitive disorders. Her research investigates the underlying mechanisms of language processing and production in both impaired and unimpaired adult populations in order to better guide the development of clinical intervention.

Previous research has suggested that different types of semantic relatedness differentially impact lexical retrieval. While there are a wide range of ways in which concepts may be related, research has increasingly focused on the distinction between two types of relatedness: taxonomic relations (the organization of concepts into categories, e.g., ANIMALS [dog, whale, lizard] or FURNITURE [table, chair, sofa]) and thematic relations (the organization of concepts into common themes, scenarios, or events, e.g., BIRTHDAY [cake, balloon, clown] or TRAVEL [airplane, suitcase, passport]). The current work systematically investigates whether individual differences in taxonomic and thematic processing impact word retrieval, and how these differences may potentially inform approaches to word-finding intervention.

Title: Prescribed joint book reading intervention for pre-school children with speech, language and communication needs.

Inger Lundeborg, PhD, is an SLP and Associate Professor at Linköping University. Her main research interest is in speech sound disorders, focusing both on children with a cognitive-linguistic basis for their SSD and children with problems with speech production (cleft palate and apraxia of speech). Her research interest during the past couple of years has been an intervention project with parent-child book reading with an interactional focus. She will report on a feasibility study, already published, and a second study in the pipe-line aiming at investigating the effect of joint book reading on parent child interaction.

Title: Observing the Unobservable Aspects of Stuttering Events

Eric Jackson, PhD, CCC-SLP is an Assistant Professor in the Communicative Sciences and Disorders department at NYU. Eric's research focuses on the variability of stuttering and the factors that drive variability including social interaction and anticipation. Eric's work has been funded by the NIH and NSF since 2015.

Abstract: Stuttering can be difficult to observe and measure, creating a mismatch between what speakers experience and what listeners perceive. This leads to a “surface mentality” in that listeners -- including clinicians and researchers -- may not always be aware when a stuttering event has occurred. In this talk, I will present neural, behavioral, and qualitative data that help make these unobservable aspects of stuttering (more) observable.

Title: Intelligibility and communicative participation in Parkinson’s disease

Inga-Lena Johansson is a Speech-Language Pathologist, a doctoral student mentored by Dr. Nicole Müller, and a lecturer in the Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences/Speech and Language Pathology at Linköping University. Her professional background is as an SLP in neuro-rehabilitation clinics.

In this talk, parts of the PhD project will be presented. The PhD project explores communicative changes due to Parkinson’s disease from a multidimensional perspective. A special focus is placed on the disease related impact on speech intelligibility, and how different methods for assessment may contribute with information supporting the planning of individually tailored interventions.

Title: Language abilities in children with speech sound disorders: The relationship between linguistic performance and speech production

Julie Case, PhD, CCC-SLP is an Assistant Professor in the Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences Department of Hofstra University. In her research program, Dr. Case studies
speech motor development and speech motor control in childhood apraxia of speech and other speech sound disorders. Dr. Case also investigates clinical management and language
abilities in monolingual and bilingual children with apraxia of speech.

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and language disorder frequently co-occur, yet the relationship between speech production and linguistic abilities has not been explored in
depth. This study performed language sample analyses using SALT to investigate whether speech accuracy predicts linguistic performance and error production in children with CAS as compared to non-CAS speech sound disorders and typical development. Better understanding of this relationship may help identify children at risk for DLD.

Title: Using Art-Making to Support Event Narratives and Emotional Expression for Children/Adolescents with Developmental Language Disorder

Lauren Hudacek, MS, CCC-SLP is a Rehabilitation Sciences PhD candidate at NYU, mentored by Dr. Christina Reuterskiöld and Dr. Ikuko Acosta. Her research interest is to optimize language assessments and interventions for children/adolescents with diagnosed communication-based impairments by leveraging the visual arts.

The presentation will cover the current CSD research evidence for the effectiveness of learner-generated visuals in child and adolescent language learning and intervention studies
as well as the results of current and upcoming interdisciplinary projects on how drawing supported personal event narrative production for English-speaking children/adolescents
diagnosed with DLD.