Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Verbal Fluency In Women With The Fmr1 Premutation And The Broad Autism Phenotype, Emily Szabo

Theses and Dissertations

Women who carry a premutation allele on the FMR1 gene can experience limitations due to their genetic status, including executive function deficits. These subtle deficits are often shared by women who possess the broad autism phenotype (BAP). Poor understanding and limited research on the extent of these executive functioning deficits has led to limited clinical management of these two groups. The current study aimed to clarity whether there is a difference in verbal fluency abilities in mothers that possess the FMR1 premutation, mothers of children with autism who are at risk for the BAP, and mothers of typically developing children, …

Lexical Properties Of Perceptual Errors Made By Younger And Older Adults Listening To Speech In Multitalker Babble, Hannah Blythe Vickery

Theses and Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this error analysis was to analyze the lexical properties of misperceptions made when listening to speech in multitalker babble.

Methods: Twenty young adults with normal hearing (YNH), 20 older adults with normal hearing (ONH), and 22 older adults with hearing impairment (OHI) completed a speech-in-babble task. Participants were asked to repeat the final word in 25 high and 25 low context sentences. On each trial, participants either responded with the correct target word, a misperception error, or skipped the trial response. Misperceptions were compiled and analyzed according to their lexical properties.

Results: Results of this study …

Towards Understanding Therapy Response In Chronic Aphasia, Sigfus Kristinsson

Theses and Dissertations

It remains largely unclear what factors determine who responds to aphasia therapy and to what degree. The current study sought to ameliorate this issue by addressing three aims: 1) To identify baseline predictors that dissociate between therapy responders and nonresponders, 2) to identify predictors of degree of treated recovery in therapy responders, and 3) to examine the generalizability of predictors identified under Aims 1 and 2 in randomly selected subsamples of study participants.

Method: Stroke survivors (N = 102; 43 females; age = 60.5y +/- 11.0y) with chronic aphasia (>12m post-stroke) were recruited as part of a multisite trial. …

An Analysis Of Mental State Verbs In Children With Hearing Loss, Morgan Vachio

Theses and Dissertations

Mental state verbs (MSV) require unique cognitive and linguistic knowledge compared to lower level function words (Shatz et al., 1983). These cognitive and linguistic demands are thought to be difficult for children with hearing loss (CHL) due to deficits in word learning (Werfel, 2017; Lund, 2016), limited depth of vocabulary knowledge (Walker et al., 2018) and deficits in complex syntax (Werfel et al., 2021). The present study recruited 73 preschool children (23 CHLCI, 22 CHL-HA and 28 CNH) to participate. Our analysis examined the frequency, lexical diversity and use of MSV within required complex syntax structures.

Neural Synchrony During Naturalistic Language Perception In Listeners With Aphasia, Lisa Johnson Norris

Theses and Dissertations

Neural synchrony across listeners during language processing has been found to be associated with successful comprehension in neurotypical adults. At initial presentation of auditory-visual stimuli, neural responses appear to oscillate in different rhythms across brain regions. As the stimulus progresses, the time course of neural activity synchronizes across listeners, particularly in primary auditory and visual processing regions. This phenomenon, which we refer to as ‘neural entrainment,’ has been observed in neurotypical individuals attending to the same stimulus. Neural synchrony occurs due to the inherent neural response elicited by a stimulus and has been shown to be consistent across participants in …

Phonological Variation Among Young Spanish-English Dual Language Learners On An English Sentence Repetition Task, Sarah Kate Coleman

Senior Theses

Purpose - There is a need for research informing best practices for assessing the language abilities of bilingual children, as well as research regarding typical phonological development of bilingual children. The purpose of the present paper is to contribute broadly to informing bilingual phonological assessment practice by examining phonological variation in Spanish-English speaking children’s English sentence repetition responses and the relation between these phonological variations and performance on the English sentence repetition task.

Method - 20 Spanish-English speaking kindergarteners completed the English sentence repetition task of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA; Peña et al., 2014). The phonological variations present in …

Systematic Review Of Factors Impacting Reading Impairment Rates In Studies Of Children With Developmental Language Disorder (Dld), Kayla Dewey

Senior Theses

This systematic review examined studies of individuals with developmental language disorder (DLD) to examine the rate of co-occurring reading impairment. We hypothesized that recruitment method, age, and the type of diagnostic reading assessment would be associated with different rates of reading impairment in individuals with DLD. We searched the database PsycINFO for peer-reviewed academic articles containing specific keywords related to DLD/SLI and Dyslexia, resulting in a total of 286 studies. These articles were then filtered to ensure that all articles analyzed in the present study only examined children below the age of 18, were a study of children with DLD/SLI, …

Effects Of Personal Fm System Use During Phonological Awareness Instruction For Children At Risk For Dyslexia, Gabriella Rose Reynolds

Theses and Dissertations

Students with reading impairments, including dyslexia, account for the largest proportion of students receiving special education services in the United States (NCES, 2016). Developmental dyslexia is characterized by slow and inaccurate word decoding (Lyon et al., 2003). This word decoding difficulty results from deficits in phonological awareness, a sound-based skill (Swan & Goswami, 1997). Classrooms are known to have high levels of background noise and are inconsistent with recommendations for optimal listening (Picard & Bradley, 2001) or accepted standards (ASHA, n.d.). Furthermore, degraded acoustic conditions have been related to poorer performance on speech-recognition tasks even for children with normal hearing …