The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in word learning ability when assessing phonological and semantic representations in elementary-age children with typical development. Methods: The study included 116 2nd graders and 25 6th graders who were tested using the Assessment Battery for Children - Word Learning. Children played virtual pirate games that tested their ability to store, retrieve, and recall phonological and semantic representations of nonwords. Results: Based on effect sizes, the largest differences in word learning ability occurred for tasks requiring phonological working memory. Overall, 6th graders had higher performance means in all aspects of word learning. Both groups performed better on tasks that required less phonological or semantic detail. Discussion: Findings align with previous research reporting that as children develop, their capacity to store, retrieve, and recall phonological information increases as a result of increased phonological loop capacity and rehearsal speed. Similarly, as children age they perform better on tasks requiring visuospatial working memory such as storing and recreating the semantic representations of new words. These findings have implications for the word learning process in children with typical development.

Research in the last decade has indicated that collaboration between speech-language pathologists (SLP) and general education teachers is a necessary component for effective instruction. Students that have language difficulties should have the necessary support to help them succeed in the general education classroom. Despite the overwhelming evidence that supports that collaboration is the best practice, it does not take place due to lack of training, time, and funding. My creative project includes a template and website that allows SLPs and teachers to collaborate to enrich instruction targeted towards third grade students diagnosed with a language disorder. This template is designed for the SLP to contribute specific language-based strategies that they implement during their therapy sessions. In turn, the general educator can access the template and easily integrate those strategies into her lessons to support the language skills of her students so that the student has more opportunities to generalize their skills. The template is formatted around the IEP goals of the students and aligned to the Common Core standards. The purpose of the template is to provide SLPs and general education teachers a means to collaborate without having to take additional time from each other's limited schedules and eliminates the need for in-person training to implement these strategies to effectively support students with language disabilities struggling in the general education classroom.

Adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) commonly have co-morbid psychiatric symptoms which can decrease quality of life. Although many adults with ASD are achieving greater independence, including attending college, psychiatric symptoms are generally not well controlled in this group. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is a program that has successfully been used to reduce the stress, depression, and anxiety symptoms in many clinical and non-clinical groups and may also be effective for college-aged students with ASD. The present investigation assessed the demand, practicality, implementation, adaptation, and acceptability of an MBSR course for college students with ASD. A total of 22 participants completed the questionnaire containing 53 questions and were between the ages of 18 to 64. We found that the MBSR therapy is in high demand for individuals with ASD, and that the participants would be willingly complete the intervention techniques. Participants generally stated that a therapy course like MBSR may help reduce their symptoms, and that they were eager to enroll. Participants were willing to attend all 8 classes during the summer, with a preference for afternoons. Also, modifications including yoga and background music would be accepted by each participant as well as any additional modifications made to the course to meet the needs of the individuals with ASD. Next steps include enrolling and randomizing students into the MBSR course or control group, as well as collect pre- and post-intervention data. We hypothesize MBSR will reduce the psychiatric symptoms and stress levels of individuals in college with ASD, demonstrating its effectiveness in this vulnerable population.

Working memory and cognitive functions contribute to speech recognition in normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners. In this study, auditory and cognitive functions are measured in young adult normal hearing, elderly normal hearing, and elderly cochlear implant subjects. The effects of age and hearing on the different measures are investigated. The correlations between auditory/cognitive functions and speech/music recognition are examined. The results may demonstrate which factors can better explain the variable performance across elderly cochlear implant users.

22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome (22q11.2DS) is one of the most frequent chromosomal microdeletion syndromes in humans. This case study focuses on the language and reading profile of a female adult with 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome who was undiagnosed until the age of 27 years old. To comprehensively describe the participant's profile, a series of assessment measures was administered in the speech, language, cognition, reading, and motor domains. Understanding how 22q11.2DS has impacted the life of a recently diagnosed adult will provide insight into how to best facilitate long-term language and educational support for this population and inform future research.

The purpose of the present study was to determine if vocabulary knowledge is related to degree of hearing loss. A 50-question multiple-choice vocabulary test comprised of old and new words was administered to 43 adults with hearing loss (19 to 92 years old) and 51 adults with normal hearing (20 to 40 years old). Degree of hearing loss ranged from mild to moderately-severe as determined by bilateral pure-tone thresholds. Education levels ranged from some high school to graduate degrees. It was predicted that knowledge of new words would decrease with increasing hearing loss, whereas knowledge of old words would be unaffected. The Test of Contemporary Vocabulary (TCV) was developed for this study and contained words with old and new definitions. The vocabulary scores were subjected to repeated-measures ANOVA with definition type (old and new) as the within-subjects factor. Hearing level and education were between-subjects factors, while age was entered as a covariate. The results revealed no main effect of age or education level, while a significant main effect of hearing level was observed. Specifically, performance for new words decreased significantly as degree of hearing loss increased. A similar effect was not observed for old words. These results indicate that knowledge of new definitions is inversely related to degree of hearing loss.

An increasing number of veterans are transitioning from military service to college. Critical to academic success is the process of decision-making, which previous research has found to be influenced by a variety of factors including anxiety and working memory (WM). Many service-related conditions often influence anxiety and WM, and given the high prevalence of these conditions among veterans, the present study aimed to analyze the effects of working memory and anxiety on decision-making behavior in U.S. Military Veterans. Participants completed a large test battery including tasks assessing WM skills (Symmetry Span Task), anxiety (Beck Anxiety Inventory), and decision-making (Iowa Gambling Task). The study results indicated that WM and anxiety both play roles in decision-making performance in young military veterans. High anxiety is related to increased avoidance of adverse outcomes in decision-making for U.S. Military Veterans, while lower working memory span is associated with greater risk-taking behavior. This study provides both functional and clinical implications into areas of possible intervention that need to be assessed in military veterans, as well as modifications to these assessments that need to be made in order to appropriately measure decision-making behavior. Future work will be done in order to more effectively analyze the adverse impacts of service-related conditions and the ways in which intervention can be implemented in order to minimize these effects.

To localize different sound sources in an environment, the auditory system analyzes acoustic properties of sounds reaching the ears to determine the exact location of a sound source. Successful sound localization is important for improving signal detection and speech intelligibility in a noisy environment. Sound localization is not a uni-sensory experience, and can be influenced by visual information (e.g., the ventriloquist effect). Vision provides contexts and organizes the auditory space for the auditory system. This investigation tracks eye movement of human subjects using a non-invasive eye-tracking system and evaluates the impact of visual stimulation on localization of a phantom sound source generated through timing-based stereophony. It was hypothesized that gaze movement could reveal the way in which visual stimulation (LED lights) shifts the perception of a sound source. However, the results show that subjects do not always move their gaze towards the light direction even when they experience strong visual capture. On average, the gaze direction indicates the perceived sound location with and without light stimulation.

Hearing and vision are two senses that most individuals use on a daily basis. The simultaneous presentation of competing visual and auditory stimuli often affects our sensory perception. It is often believed that vision is the more dominant sense over audition in spatial localization tasks. Recent work suggests that visual information can influence auditory localization when the sound is emanating from a physical location or from a phantom location generated through stereophony (the so-called "summing localization"). The present study investigates the role of cross-modal fusion in an auditory localization task. The focuses of the experiments are two-fold: (1) reveal the extent of fusion between auditory and visual stimuli and (2) investigate how fusion is correlated with the amount of visual bias a subject experiences. We found that fusion often occurs when light flash and "summing localization" stimuli were presented from the same hemifield. However, little correlation was observed between the magnitude of visual bias and the extent of perceived fusion between light and sound stimuli. In some cases, subjects reported distinctive locations for light and sound and still experienced visual capture.

This pilot study evaluated whether Story Champs and Puente de Cuentos helped bilingual preschoolers increase their usage of emotional terms and ability to tell stories. Participants in this study included 10 Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers. Intervention was conducted in 9 sessions over 3 days using the Test of Narrative Retell to measure results. Results did not find significant gains in either emotional term usage or ability to tell stories, but the results were promising as a pilot study.