Communication Sciences and Disorders Commons^™

Monolingual Versus Bilingual Use Of Context To Facilitate Speech Recognition In Background Noise: A Systematic Review, Rachel Abucasis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Introduction: Previous literature has shown that bilingual listeners face more challenges than monolinguals during speech recognition in adverse listening conditions. As noisy environments degrade the acoustic stimuli and leave the listener with a partial or ambiguous signal to pair to a lexical representation, it is not possible to do so with the acoustic and phonological features alone. Bilinguals consistently use a significant amount of their cognitive resources during the early stages of speech processing, partially due to their need to navigate between the two languages. With exhaustion of most of their cognitive resources, there is limited capacity available to use …

Audiologists' Perspectives On Noise Induced Hearing Loss, Rachael L. Cleary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Excessive noise has long been established in the literature as a prevalent workplace hazard. The high prevalence of occupational noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) has led to high economic costs and has produced many physical and mental health effects on workers exposed to occupational noise. Standards set by OSHA are implemented in the workplace in order to protect employees. Despite these regulations set by OSHA, millions of workers in the United States are still exposed to excessive occupational noise, with limited use of hearing protection. The high prevalence of occupational NIHL and low use of hearing protective devices (HPDs) brings into …

Cochlear Implant Evaluations Of Spanish-Speaking Adults, Mariana Mejia Turnbull

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background. As the Hispanic population in the U.S. continues to increase, audiologists need valid and reliable speech perception materials in Spanish to be able to offer evidence-based, high quality hearing health care to this population. The purpose of this study was to investigate current trends in CI evaluations of Spanish-speaking adults in clinics around the country, with a specific focus on sentence perception tests (Part 1). An additional goal was to analyze and compare the linguistical content of the Spanish sentence perception tests found to be the most commonly used among clinicians (Part 2).

Methods. A questionnaire was created and …

Intervention Approaches For Childhood Apraxia Of Speech: An Overview Of Prevailing Treatment Methods, Toni Lewis

University Honors Theses

This paper aims to describe the theory and methods of select intervention approaches for childhood apraxia of speech so readers may better understand current treatment techniques. Covered in this paper are Rapid Syllable Transitions (ReST), Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing (DTTC), Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets (PROMPT), as well as supplemental techniques such as augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and ultrasound biofeedback. Also covered briefly are instances of CAS treatment in languages other than English.

A Diagnostic Pocket Guide For Audiologists: Outer, Middle, And Inner Ear Disorders And Chronic Diseases, Ashley Andino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Given the Scope of Practice for Audiologists as outlined by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), the diverse occupational settings audiologists belong to, and the varied multidisciplinary collaboration necessary, audiologists are tasked with needing, at minimum, a baseline understanding of a wide range of disorders. This includes not only otological diseases, but multisystem disorders that affect the auditory system. While an abundance of diagnostic audiological information on various disorders and their impacts are available, there exists a gap in the availability of condensed and accessible diagnostic information for everyday use. The goal of the resulting diagnostic pocket guide is to provide …

Predictors Of Therapy Response In Chronic Aphasia: Building A Foundation For Personalized Aphasia Therapy, Sigfus Kristinsson, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Chris Rorden, Roger Newman-Norlund, Jean Neils-Strunjas, Julius Fridriksson

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Chronic aphasia, a devastating impairment of language, affects up to a third of stroke survivors. Speech and language therapy has consistently been shown to improve language function in prior clinical trials, but few clinicially applicable predictors of individual therapy response have been identified to date. Consequently, clinicians struggle substantially with prognostication in the clinical management of aphasia. A rising prevalence of aphasia, in particular in younger populations, has emphasized the increasing demand for a personalized approach to aphasia therapy, that is, therapy aimed at maximizing language recovery of each individual with reference to evidence-based clinical recommendations. In this narrative review, …

Effects Of Animal-Assisted Therapy On Communication, Agitation And General Health In Individuals With Dementia Living In Long-Term Care Facilities And The Secondary Effects On Their Caregivers., Jenilee K. Woltman

Communication Disorders Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

The use of animals for therapeutic purposes has existed for centuries. However, it was not until recently that people realized the human-animal interaction has potential effects on our overall health. Human-animal interaction positively impacts humans' social, emotional, and cognitive functions (Woods et al., 2005). This research encompasses two studies. Both studies examined the therapeutic effects of an animal-assisted therapy (AAT) dog presence on communication abilities and agitation of individuals with mild to severe dementia residing in a long-term care facility. Study 1 examined agitated behaviors, communications, and social interactions of older adults with dementia living in a long-term care facility …

Comparing Relative And Absolute Reliability Of Short Versus Long Narrative Retells, Jenna Hollis

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the current study was to examine and compare relative and absolute reliability estimates between brief, linguistically compact narrative retells and longer, more linguistically diffuse narrative retells. The participants included 190 school-age children in firstsixth grade from Utah, Arizona, and Colorado. Participants completed two brief narrative retells using the Narrative Language Measures (NLM) Listening subtest of the CUBED assessment and one longer narrative retell using the wordless picture book Frog, Where Are You? (FWAY). These language samples were then analyzed for language productivity, complexity, and story grammar elements using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts software program and …

Dynamic Measures Of Referential Communication Reveal Hidden Pragmatic Strengths For Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Mariana Schreuders

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

The ability to communicate effectively and efficiently while maintaining mutual understanding is a fundamental aspect of human-to-human interaction. Studies have shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) face challenges in areas of social communication skills, such as aspects of referential communication; or the ability to refer to things in such a way that a listener will know what the speaker is describing. The current study used data from a preexisting Barrier study to compare the referential communication abilities of school-aged children with ASD to those of neurotypical children (NT). Referential communication was observed during a barrier task, where participants …

Pre-Pulse Inhibition In Mutated Mice: Studying Compromised Microglial Cells To Discover New Genetic Connections To Autism, Bailey R. Kramarik

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Microglial cells “play a pivotal role in refining neural networks during early critical periods” (Gabriele & Gray, 2020, p. 1). A disturbance in the functioning of these microglial cells contribute to specific characteristics of some neurodevelopmental disorders- including autism spectrum disorder. In this study, we used a mouse model to study disruptions in cell activity, as understanding the biological and genetic background of autism spectrum disorder could help us provide better treatment and therapy options to those diagnosed.

The mutated mice in this experiment have microglial cells with “compromised fractalkine signaling” (Gabriele & Gray, 2020, p. 4-5). We studied multimodal …

The Impact Of Distance Education On Therapy Services For Students With Asd: An Slp Perspective, Andrea Spragg

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

The coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused an abrupt change in the day-to-day lives of individuals across the world as adults were forced to work from home and children were forced into virtual school environments. For all students, this disruption in schedule and daily routine been hard, but especially those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (Mumbardo-Adam et al., 2021). For many students with ASD, school is a place in which they receive many essential services and social interactions, such as speech therapy, that they may not receive other places. The purpose of this survey research was to understand the …

The Relationship Between Quality Of Life Outcomes And Social Hearing For Cochlear Implant Recipients Using The Nciq And Pipsl, Bonnie A. Purtill

Dissertations, 2020-current

Unmanaged hearing loss can have profound cognitive, social, and emotional impacts on a person’s life. Cochlear implants improve functional skills such as auditory detection and speech discrimination, and have also been shown to improve quality of life. Health related quality of life (HRQoL) measures are a great tool to assess mental, physical, and social changes after cochlear implantation. While previous research has established improvement in HRQoL after cochlear implantation, there remains a lack of research evaluating long-term effects of cochlear implants for post-lingually and bilaterally deafened adults. Using a disease specific HRQoL questionnaire—Nijmegen Cochlear Implant Questionnaire (NCIQ) and a social …

Amplitude-Modulated Cvemp (Amcvemps) Versus Transient Cvemp Response Properties: Possible Implications, Andrew Thorne

Dissertations, 2020-current

Cervical vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (cVEMPs) elicited by steady-state amplitude-modulated (AM) tones yield different information than conventional cVEMPs elicited by transient tonebursts, such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and phase coherence (PC). This study systematically examined the effects of tonic EMG activation on AMcVEMP response properties versus conventional transient cVEMPs. Thirty five young, healthy adults (ages 19–23) with normal audiograms and no known vestibular lesions participated in this study. AMcVEMPs were elicited with bone-conducted tones with a carrier frequency of 500 Hz and an amplitude modulation frequency of 37 Hz, and transient cVEMPs were elicited by 4-0-4 Blackman-gated 500 Hz tonebursts …

The Relationship Between The Vestibular Ocular Reflex And Perception In Young Healthy Adults, Susanne Nelson

Dissertations, 2020-current

Vestibular impairments are often identified through measures of vestibular reflexes such as the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR). However, in clinical practice measures of the VOR do not always correlate with the patient’s reported symptoms. In contrast to physiologic measures like the VOR, psychophysical methods can be used to assess a person’s perception of movement. Previous psychophysics research shows that perceptual thresholds of angular motion do not correlate with VOR measures, but this has not been assessed at suprathreshold levels. The purpose of this study was to assess whether vestibular reflexive responses (i.e., VOR) were correlated to the patient’s perception of movement …

Temporal Modulation Transfer Functions Of Amplitude-Modulated Cervical Vestibular Evoked Myogenic Potentials In Young Adults, Kerri Lawlor

Dissertations, 2020-current

Cervical vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (cVEMPs) are widely used to evaluate saccular function in clinical and research applications. Typically, transient tonebursts are used to elicit cVEMPs. In this study, we used bone-conducted amplitude-modulated (AM) tones to elicit AMcVEMPs. This new approach allows the examination of phase-locked vestibular responses across a range of modulation frequencies. Currently, cVEMP temporal modulation transfer functions (TMTFs) are not well defined. The purposes of the present study were 1) to characterize the AMcVEMP TMTF in young, healthy individuals, 2) to compare AMcVEMP TMTFs across different analysis approaches, and 3) to determine the upper frequency limit of …

A Survey Of Cochlear Implant Clinical Protocols In India, Ariana Morris

Dissertations, 2020-current

The most recent data published in December 2019 records that approximately 736,900 registered cochlear implantation devices have been received since their approval in the 1980s. While 183,100 of these devices belong to U.S. Citizens, the large majority of cochlear implant recipients live in other countries (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2016). While a lack of standardized practices exists in relation to audiologic care and management of cochlear implant devices and patients, Browning et al. (2020) attempts to assess and analyze common practices amongst audiologists practicing within the United States of America. This survey uses a modified questionnaire based …

Remote-Frequency Masking And Speech Perception In Adults, Taylor L. Arbogast

Dissertations, 2020-current

The primary purpose of this study is threefold: to use SRT measurements to examine the effect of various remote-frequency, narrowband maskers on adult’s perception of narrowband speech, to compare the performance between low and high band speech stimuli, and to evaluate the combination of these approaches by examining the correlation between the masking effect observed with speech and pure tone stimuli. Twelve subjects aged 22-34, with hearing thresholds no worse than 15 dB HL for frequencies 500-8000 Hz, participated in two listening tasks. In the speech perception task, coordinate response measure (CRM) sentences and their maskers were separately filtered into …

Quasi-Experimental Design And Outcomes Of A Graduate Clinician And Caregiver-Infant Coaching Intervention In A University Speech-Language Pathology Program, Shiree C. Harbick

Dissertations, 2020-current

Infants are born ready to learn language as one of their most critical developmental tasks, yet infants subject to environmental risk factors related to poverty and low maternal education have been shown to lag behind their peers in language development as early as 8 months of age. Research also indicates the quality of an infant’s language environment can significantly diminish the effects of these risk factors. This quasi-experimental clinical research study explored the effects of a preventive caregiver-infant coaching intervention delivered by graduate student clinicians in a university speech-language pathology program.

Developed based on a systematic review of preventive programs …

The Effect Of Two Rate Change Approaches On Speech Movement Patterns, Noelle Marie Lewis

Theses and Dissertations

The current study examined the effect of different rate change approaches on speech movement patterns, including increasing and decreasing speaking rate volitionally, as well as with delayed auditory feedback (DAF). There were 10 participants, five male and five female, with a mean age of 25 years. All were typical speakers. Participants spoke the sentence “Don’t fight or pout over a toy car” under slow, fast and DAF speaking conditions. A total of 5 sensors were glued to each participant’s tongue, teeth, and lips. NDI Wave electromagnetic articulography recorded the articulatory movements from these sensors as the participants spoke. Metrics for …

Like, It’S Important: The Frequency And Use Of Like In Autism Spectrum Disorder, Rebekah Jones

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Background & Aims: Discourse markers, such as well or like serve a variety of functions to support conversational reciprocity: filling pauses, aiding word-finding, holding conversational turns, and providing information about pause length. Previous research shows that individuals with ASD use discourse markers less frequently than neurotypical (NT) peers; however, the discourse marker like has been left out of that research, despite its ubiquitous use by NT individuals, and despite the fact that like serves important pragmatic functions that are not encoded by any other discourse marker. Specifically, like signals to the listener that the content of upcoming speech is 1) …