Digital Commons Network^™

Interdisciplinary Skill Development During Summer Autism Clinic, Rachel F. Kagle

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The present paper focuses on the interdisciplinary skill development of speech-language pathology graduate student clinicians and occupational therapy graduate student clinicians in the treatment of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. This paper explains the significance of these disciplines in the treatment of Autism before giving the results of the study. For the present study, data was collected at James Madison University’s Summer Autism Camp over a four-week period. There were ten speech-language pathology (SLP) clinicians that received the survey and eleven children with Autism that were enrolled in the program. It was hypothesized that the SLP clinicians would display skill …

The Relationship Between Fundamental Frequency Variation And Articulation In Healthy Speech Production, Casey Behre

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Fundamental Frequency (F0) and articulation are two factors of speech production that impact speech perception, and yet the potential interactions of these two factors are not well understood. Their relationship has potential theoretical as well as clinical implications. This Honors Project aims to better understand this relationship by examining changes in fundamental frequency (F0) and the acoustic vowel space as an index of articulatory behaviors with a within-speaker approach. Specifically, F0 variations were examined in relation to the acoustic vowel space for 10 male native speakers of American English. Two sets of acoustic measures were made to evaluate F0 and …

Effect Of Biofeedback And Exercise Type On Neural Swallowing Control, Rachel J. Rinehart

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The clinical efficacy of swallowing exercises is well established in swallowing literature, and biofeedback has been shown to augment cortical hemodynamic response (HDR) during normal swallowing. This study compared HDR during swallowing exercises with and without biofeedback to HDR during normal swallows with and without biofeedback. Healthy adult participants (n=6, mean age=50.83 male=2) were recruited and trained on the following conditions: normal swallowing, swallowing exercise in which a specific physiological target was given (skilled), and swallowing exercises in which no specific physiological target had to be achieved (non-skilled). Biofeedback consisted of submental surface electromyography (sEMG) signals displayed visually. HDR were …

Maladaptive Behavior And Communication Disorders Following Tbi: Survivor, Caregiver And Speech-Language Pathologists' Perspectives, Marena S. Jones

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Following traumatic brain injury (TBI), individuals often face neurobehavioral challenges (e.g., aggression) that hinder treatment. Research on the relationship between communication disorders and maladaptive behaviors is limited. Participants from a convenience sample of two survivors of TBI, a caregiver, and a speech-language pathologist were interviewed about their experiences and perspectives. The interviews reflected focused questions that were congruent across participants. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded. Each coder coded the transcriptions individually, they were then compared using consensus coding for reliability, and finally analyzed for emergent themes. The two most referenced themes were “Communication challenges” and “Changes through rehab”. “Communication …

Mother’S Perceptions Of Their Personal Impact On Infant Language Development, Miranda Steinbeck

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

During the early months of a child’s language development, their ability to perceive and process language is very fluid and the language input they receive can have a large impact on their language later in life. From the beginning, children need to be able to differentiate the sounds of speech from the rest of the sounds that occur in their environment (Golinkoff, Can, Soderstrom, Hirsh-Pasek, 2015). In other words, children are exposed to the different sounds in their environment and they begin to pick up on the speech sounds, such as conversation-like interactions, with their parents (Golinkoff et al., 2015). …

Effects Of Age, Timbre, Pitch Contour, And Background Noise On Melodic Contour Identification And Sentence Recognition By Children, Lindsey M. Seyfried, Sarah A. Troy

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The researchers collaborated together with the help of Dr. Yingjiu Nie in the Lab of Auditory Perception in Children and Adults on the four research studies completed there. Through these projects, they were involved in all areas of the research process. While they cannot claim the research project as their own, by assisting the graduate students and Dr. Nie, they exposed themselves to how research is conducted in this field and gained valuable knowledge in the process. To conclude the project, they each wrote individual personals reflection to summarize and review the experience.

The Effects Of Age On The Perception Of Frequency In Noise, Mary E. Scherer

Dissertations, 2014-2019

Difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background noise is one of the most common complaints of older adults, both with and without hearing loss. One possible contributing factor is an age-related decline in neural synchrony (e.g., phase locking). Tones-in-noise were used in an attempt to disrupt rate-place coding of frequency and to encourage participants to use phase-locked, temporal representations of frequency during a behavioral frequency discrimination task. Fourteen adults participated in the study (five younger, aged 21-29; four middle aged, 41-50; and five older, aged 61-80). Participants had clinically normal hearing sensitivity (≤ 25 dB HL at octave frequencies …

The Effect Of Workplace Noise Exposure On Reaction Time, Hollis T. Leidy

Dissertations, 2014-2019

This study examined the effect of listening fatigue on the reaction time of normal hearing listeners, who work in noisy places, at different signal to noise ratios (quiet, +5 and +10 dB). Reaction time was measured using a single task paradigm on twelve male listeners (ages 23-58 years) before and after an eight hour shift at a noisy power plant. The participants in the study also completed a subjective rating questionnaire at two intervals, before and after the fatigue-inducing condition. Results of the study indicated that the reaction time was significantly longer for the most difficult listening condition, indicating the …

Development And Deployment Of A Small Stereo-Hearing Testing System: Two Manuscripts, Sofia A. Ganev

Dissertations, 2014-2019

MANUSCRIPT #1 TITLE

Development of a Deployable Stereo-Hearing System

ABSTRACT

Objective: To investigate the effectiveness and efficiency of a portable stereo-hearing testing system with the intent of deployment for data collection in future studies. We quantify sound localization accuracy and speech-in-noise thresholds comparing unilateral (such as single-sided deafness) and bilateral subjects. We desired to design a small, inexpensive system that would show a large effect size between binaural and monaural subjects in a variety of stereo hearing tasks.

Methods: Subjects were tested on localization accuracy and speech understanding in noise using a laboratory-made stereo-hearing testing device. For the …

Effect Of Age On Abrs In Mice With Epha4 Mutations, Melissa M. Teller

Dissertations, 2014-2019

It is known that EphA4 can influence the establishment of tonotopic pathways in the auditory system. This can be measured by an increase in thresholds on the auditory brainstem response test (ABR) in mice. It is also known that the aging population in humans tends to have poorer thresholds in the high frequency sounds as they age, termed presbycusis or age-related hearing loss. The C57BL/6J background strain of mice that is known to experience a presbycusis-like process, although it is not specified when this process begins and how it progresses through their life span. The goal of this study was …

The Neural Representation Of Frequency In Quiet And Noise Across The Adult Life Span, Alexandra Bove

Dissertations, 2014-2019

The purpose of the present study was to examine why older adults have trouble with speech-in-noise understanding. Difficulty with speech-in-noise comprehension has been associated with age-related degradation in frequency processing. Our study sought to investigate this relationship by examining the neural representation of frequency in quiet and in noise across the adult-life span. In order to do this, one behavioral correlate of frequency processing, frequency difference limens (FDLs), and one electrophysiological correlate, the frequency following response (FFR), was utilized. In the present study, we specifically focus on the electrophysiological measures of frequency processing across the adult life span. It was …

Efficacy Of Digital Otoscopy In Telemedicine, Alexandra B. Short

Dissertations, 2014-2019

With an average of 1 audiologist to every 20,000 people in developed countries and as many as 6.25 million people in developing countries, the need for audiology services in rural or underserved populations is evident (Swanepoel, et al., 2010). Telemedicine offers an affordable solution. Previous studies assessed digital otoscopy images for postsurgical follow-up (Kokesh, et al., 2008) as well as remote video otoscopy by telehealth technicians (Biagio, et al., 2013). These studies used traditional laptop based video otoscopes. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether more portable and less expensive systems, such as the CellScope and OTO …