Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

An Exploration Of Automated Narrative Analysis Via Machine Learning, Sharad Jones, Carly Fox, Sandra Laing Gillam, Ronald B. Gillam

Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education Faculty Publications

The accuracy of four machine learning methods in predicting narrative macrostructure scores was compared to scores obtained by human raters utilizing a criterion-referenced progress monitoring rubric. The machine learning methods that were explored covered methods that utilized hand-engineered features, as well as those that learn directly from the raw text. The predictive models were trained on a corpus of 414 narratives from a normative sample of school-aged children (5;0-9;11) who were given a standardized measure of narrative proficiency. Performance was measured using Quadratic Weighted Kappa, a metric of inter-rater reliability. The results indicated that one model, BERT, not only achieved …

A Comparison Of The Storage-Only Deficit And Joint Mechanism Deficit Hypotheses Of The Verbal Working Memory Storage Capacity Limitation Of Children With Developmental Language Disorder, James W. Montgomery, Ronald B. Gillam, Julia L. Evans, Sarah Schwartz, Jamison D. Fargo

Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education Faculty Publications

Purpose: The storage-only deficit and joint mechanism deficit hypotheses are two possible explanations of the verbal working memory (vWM) storage capacity limitation of school-age children with developmental language disorder (DLD). We assessed the merits of each hypothesis in a large group of children with DLD and a group of same-age typically developing (TD) children.

Method: Participants were 117 children with DLD and 117 propensity-matched TD children 7-11 years of age. Children completed tasks indexing vWM capacity, verbal short-term storage, sustained attention, attention switching, and lexical long-term memory (LTM).

Results: For the DLD group, all of the mechanisms jointly explained 26.5% …

Individualized Frequency Importance Functions For Listeners With Sensorineural Hearing Loss, Sarah E. Yoho Leopold, Adam K. Bosen

Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education Faculty Publications

The Speech Intelligibility Index includes a series of frequency importance functions for calculating the estimated intelligibility of speech under various conditions. Until recently, techniques to derive frequency importance required averaging data over a group of listeners, thus hindering the ability to observe individual differences due to factors such as hearing loss. In the current study, the “random combination strategy” [Bosen and Chatterjee (2016). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 140, 3718–3727] was used to derive frequency importance functions for individual hearing-impaired listeners, and normal-hearing participants for comparison. Functions were measured by filtering sentences to contain only random subsets of frequency bands …

Parent Challenges, Perspectives And Experiences Caring For Children Who Are Deaf Or Hard-Of-Hearing With Other Disabilities: A Comprehensive Review, John J. Whicker, Karen F. Muñoz, Lauri H. Nelson

Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education Faculty Publications

Objective: The purpose of this literature review was to explore parent challenges in caring for children who are deaf or hard of hearing with other disabilities and discuss implications for audiologists related to supporting families.

Design: A comprehensive literature review was conducted, and through qualitative analysis, emergent themes were identified, and a narrative summary generated.

Study sample: Nine research studies were included in this review. Combined, these studies reflect a sample of 111 children, 23 families and 41 parents.

Results: Three broad themes were identified, and include parent-reported challenges related to family, professional and child variables. Sub-themes were identified within …