Communication Sciences and Disorders Commons^™

Modeling Hrtf For Sound Localization In Normal Listeners And Bilateral Cochlear Implant Users, Douglas A. Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mathematical models can be very useful for understanding complicated systems and for testing algorithms through simulation that would be difficult or expensive to implement. This dissertation presents a model that attempts to simulate the sound localization performance of persons using bilateral cochlear implants. The expectation is that this model could prove to be a useful tool in developing new signal processing algorithms for neural encoding strategies.

The head related transfer function (HRTF) is a critical component of this model, and in the ideal case, provides the base characteristics of head shadow, torso and pinna effects. This defines the temporal, intensity …

Time-Frequency Analysis Of Transient-Evoked Otoacoustic Emissions In Children Exposed To Carboplatin Chemotherapy, Shaum Bhagat, Johnnie Bass, Ibrahim Qaddoumi, Rachel Brennan, Matthew Wilson, Jianrong Wu, Carlos-Rodriguez Galindo, Alessia Paglialonga, Gabriella Tognola

Faculty Publications

The aims of this study were to characterize and quantify time-frequency changes in transient-evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAEs) recorded in children diagnosed with retinoblastoma who were receiving carboplatin chemotherapy. A signal processing technique, the wavelet transform (WT), was used to analyze TEOAE waveforms in narrow-band frequency components. Ten children (aged 3–72 months) diagnosed with unilateral or bilateral retinoblastoma were enrolled in the study. TEOAEs were acquired from the children with linear sequences of 70 dB peak equivalent SPL clicks. After WT analysis, TEOAE energy, latency and normalized energy in the narrow-band frequency components were compared before and during carboplatin chemotherapy treatment …

The Use Of Music Stimulation To Increase On-Task Behavior In Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorder And Language Processing Disorder, Chelsea Fitch

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Previous research has investigated the effect of music stimulation on children with autism (Boso, Emanuele, Minazzi, Abbamonte, & Politi, 2007; Brownell, 2002; Finnigan & Starr, 2010; Kuhlman & Schweinhart (n.d.); Lundqvist, Andersson, & Viding, 2009; Orr, Myles, & Carlson, 1998; Wood, 1991) with mixed results. The National Standards project has categorized music therapy as an "emerging" treatment methodology, indicating that more research is needed to fully examine its effectiveness when used in intervention for individuals with autism (National Autism Center, 2012). Reviews of the literature have indicated that children with language processing disorder may also benefit from music stimulation (Geist, …

Cognitive Aspects Of Stuttering, Megan Tredway

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Along with difficulties to produce fluent speech, individuals who stutter have been found to display differences in other areas of communication, such as language, articulation, reading, and cognitive abilities, as well as working memory. Working memory is a higher cognitive function underlying thinking and learning; therefore, reduced working memory skills may contribute to the variety of difficulties experienced by individuals who stutter. The purpose of this study was to investigate the working memory abilities of children who stutter. A relationship has been found between working memory skills and producing efficient discourse. The present study explored the relationship between working memory …

Fluency In Bilingual Preschool Children, Jenna Dechristopher

Undergraduate Review

Purpose: 1) To examine the spontaneous speech fluency of typically developing bilingual children obtained during an oral narrative task involving a conversational interview. 2) To determine what type of disfluencies may be present and 3) To investigate if there is a difference between fluency data obtained live and fluency data obtained from audio recordings during fluency sampling.

Method: Two examiners were used for this study. A corpus of one hundred words was obtained from eight participants by both examiners, audio taped, and transcribed. Live data was also obtained during the time of speech sampling. The participants were preschoolers between ages …

The Relation Of Socioeconomic Status, Parental Education, Vocabulary And Language Skills Of Children Who Stutter, Corrin G. Richels, Kia N. Johnson, Tedra A. Walden, Edward G. Conture

Communication Disorders & Special Education Faculty Publications

Purpose: The purpose of this project was to investigate the possible relation between standardized measures of vocabulary/language, mother and father education, and a composite measure of socioeconomic status (SES) for children who do not stutter (CWNS) and children who stutter (CWS).

Methods: Participants were 138 CWNS and 159 CWS between the ages of 2;6 and 6;3 and their families. The Hollingshead Four Factor Index of Social Position (i.e., Family SES) was used to calculate SES based on a composite score consisting of weighted values for paternal and maternal education and occupation. Statistical regression analyses were conducted to investigate the relation …

Lessons Learned From Aac Camp, Janet L. Dodd

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Children who benefit from augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) need not only the support of individuals knowledgeable in the technologies themselves, but ones who understand the translation of language intervention principles to AAC.

Women Who Stutter : Experiences Of Developing Self-Management And Quality Of Life, Katherine Milton

Theses : Honours

Background and Purpose: Research suggests that stuttering can impact an individual’s quality of life and how they perceive themselves in interactions with others. As a larger proportion of adults who stutter are men, limited research is available regarding the specific experiences of women who stutter (WWS). Existent literature regarding WWS was mainly published in the 1970s -1980s and may no longer represent current issues. This study aimed to explore the current influences on quality of life, perception of stuttering, self-management strategies, and gender issues experienced by WWS.

Methods and Procedures: This grounded theory study used a convenience sample of eight …

The Impact Of Service-Learning On Academics Related To Neurogenic Communication Disorders, Ricki A. Konnerup

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

"Service-Learning (SL) is a pedagogical approach used to assist students in higher education in learning academic material by providing them an experience with a community partner. SL involves academic course objectives that are linked to a community need and includes student reflection on the experience (Goldberg, McCormick Richburg, & Wood, 2006). SL research is limited, but has been an increasing interest for medical, sociology, education, and communication disorders fields. This study describes the effect that SL has on academic learning related to neurogenic communication disorders, attitudes towards SL, and community benefits. One section of a senior level undergraduate course in …

Vowel Production In Mandarin Accented English And American English: Kinematic And Acoustic Data From The Marquette University Mandarin Accented English Corpus, An Ji, Jeffrey J. Berry, Michael T. Johnson

Speech Pathology and Audiology Faculty Research and Publications

Few electromagnetic articulography (EMA) datasets are publicly available, and none have focused systematically on non-native accented speech. We introduce a kinematic-acoustic database of speech from 40 (gender and dialect balanced) participants producing upper-Midwestern American English (AE) L1 or Mandarin Accented English (MAE) L2 (Beijing or Shanghai dialect base). The Marquette University EMA-MAE corpus will be released publicly to help advance research in areas such as pronunciation modeling, acoustic-articulatory inversion, L1-L2 comparisons, pronunciation error detection, and accent modification training. EMA data were collected at a 400 Hz sampling rate with synchronous audio using the NDI Wave System. Articulatory sensors were placed …

The Effects Of Practice On The Concurrent Performance Of A Speech And Postural Task In Persons With Parkinson Disease And Healthy Controls, Christopher Dromey, K Bo Foreman, Stuart Sondrup, Eon Jarvis, Shawn Nissen, Leland E. Dibble

Faculty Publications

Purpose. Persons with Parkinson disease (PD) demonstrate deficits in motor learning as well as bidirectional interference (the performance of one task concurrently interferes with the performance of another task) during dual-task performance. Few studies have examined the practice dosages necessary for behavioral change in rehabilitation relevant tasks. Therefore, to compare the effects of age and PD on motor learning during dual-task performance, this pilot study examined persons with PD as well as neurologically healthy participants during concurrent performance of postural and speaking tasks. Methods. Seven persons with PD and 7 healthy age-matched and 10 healthy young control subjects were tested …

Interprofessional Education: A Pilot Study Of Rehabilitation Sciences Students Participating In Interdisciplinary International Service-Learning, Celia Pechak, Eugenia Gonzalez, Connie Summers, Stephanie Capshaw

Faculty Publications

Various models of interprofessional education, including service-learning, are used to teach students how to be effective members of healthcare teams. The purpose of this study was to examine pilot data related to the impact of an elective one-credit global health course with an international service-learning experience (ISL) on the student participants. An interdisciplinary team of 3 faculty accompanied 4 students representing occupational therapy, physical therapy, and speech-language pathology programs for an 8-day ISL experience. Students responded to faculty-developed reflection questions pre-travel, during travel, and 2-weeks and 4-months post travel. Content analysis was used to analyze themes that emerged from the …

Syllabic Patterns In The Early Vocalizations Of Quichua Children, Christina E. Gildersleeve-Neumann, Barbara L. Davis, Peter F. Macneilage

Speech and Hearing Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

To understand the interactions between production patterns common to children regardless of language environment and the early appearance of production effects based on perceptual learning from the ambient language requires the study of languages with diverse phonological properties. Few studies have evaluated early phonological acquisition patterns of children in non-Indo-European language environments. In the current study, across- and within-syllable consonant-vowel co-occurrence patterns in babbling were analyzed for a 6-month period for seven Ecuadorean Quichua learning children who were between 9 and 17 months of age at study onset. Their babbling utterances were compared to the babbling of six English-learning children …

Facilitation Of Language Acquisition Viewed Through An Interpretative Lens: The Role Of Authenticity, Melanie Ann Harper

Wayne State University Dissertations

A paradigm is the conceptual framework or lens one uses to view reality. The field of speech-language pathology is traditionally rooted in the empirical paradigm, which believes that language can be fragmented into isolated skills and taught in a hierarchal fashion. This belief has resulted in service delivery models that remove students from naturalistic contexts for decontextualized exercises. Progress in language acquisition is measured objectively. The empirical belief is exemplified by the accountability requirements in special education law (e.g., IEP). It is compounded by the realities of public school speech-language pathologists (SLPs), such as high caseload numbers, multiple buildings, and …

Age-Related Changes To The Production Of Linguistic Prosody, Daniel Richard Barnes

Open Access Theses

The production of speech prosody (the rhythm, pausing, and intonation associated with natural speech) is critical to effective communication. The current study investigated the impact of age-related changes to physiology and cognition in relation to the production of two types of linguistic prosody: lexical stress and the disambiguation of syntactically ambiguous utterances. Analyses of the acoustic correlates of stress: speech intensity (or sound-pressure level; SPL), fundamental frequency (F0), key word/phrase duration, and pause duration revealed that both young and older adults effectively use these acoustic features to signal linguistic prosody, although the relative weighting of cues differed by group. Differences …

Preschool Language And Phonological Proficiencies In Predicting Stuttering Recovery Or Persistence, Caroline E. Spencer

Open Access Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between expressive and receptive language, phonological, and verbal working memory proficiencies in the preschool years and eventual recovery from or persistence in stuttering. Participants included 40 children who stutter (CWS). At ages 3-5 years, participants were administered the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language, 3rd edition (TACL-3), the Structured Photographic Expressive Language Test, 3rd edition (SPELT-3), Bankson-Bernthal Test of Phonology--Consonant Inventory subtest (BBTOP--CI), Test of Auditory Perceptual Skills--Revised (TAPS--R) auditory number memory and auditory word memory subtests, and the Dollaghan & Campbell Nonword Repetition Test (NRT). Stuttering behaviors were tracked …

Self-Ratings Of Communication Style And Discourse Performance Of Healthy Aging Adults, Hayley E. Besten

Theses and Dissertations--Communication Sciences and Disorders

This study investigated the accuracy of healthy aging adults‟ self-rating of communication style, as measured by quantifiable measures of discourse performance. Ninety cognitively healthy adults participated and comprised three age cohorts (20s, 40s, 60s). Participants completed discourse tasks that included recounting a vacation, telling a story, and describing a picture. Participants also self-rated their communication style, placing them in a talkative or reserved cohort. Communication style was measured by discourse performance variables of interest: length of output (TNW) and informativeness (%IU). When presented with an unconstrained task (recounting a vacation), talkative and reserved groups, regardless of age, produced a similar …

Structural Processing Of Language Components: Detection And Comprehension, Samantha Rose Crow

Wayne State University Theses

Although music and language share many perceptually functional characteristics, research endeavors are still focusing on the underlying neural circuitry. Past research has indicated a distinction of hemispheric lateralization between music and language processing. Recently, efforts have shifted to the notion of an initial general shared pathway in the brain with auditory stimuli differentiated in later processing to specialized regions. Therefore, both linguistic and musical components have been examined in numerous experiments to discern the possible influence of music and language components on auditory perception and comprehension, including their potential interaction. However, the effects of sentential prosody on early language structural …

Social Story Intervention For Children Who Are Deaf Or Hard-Of-Hearing, Kaylee Mccollum

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Originally developed for children with mild autism, a Social Story is a short story that describes an ambiguous or troublesome situation and provides an appropriate response to that situation. Several research studies have confirmed the effectiveness of Social Stories in decreasing undesirable behaviors in children with mild, moderate, and severe autism spectrum disorder (ASD); however, limited research has been conducted to determine the efficacy of Social Stories in modifying behaviors of children who do not have autism. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of Social Stories in decreasing undesirable behaviors in children who are deaf or …

Using Multisensory Input To Supplement Articulation Intervention, Caitlin A. Maxheimer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of multisensory input on the discrimination and production abilities of a preschool aged child with a speech sound disorder. The study examined the effect of Van Riper's traditional articulation intervention approach supplemented with multisensory cues taken from the Sound Strategies for Sound Production resource (Treatment B), in contrast to Van Riper's traditional articulation intervention approach alone (Treatment A). One male child, aged 4 years, 4 months, diagnosed with a mild-moderate speech sound disorder, participated in this single subject, alternating treatment study. Treatment was provided for 30 minutes, 3 days a …