By: Lynn M. Maher, PhD, CCC-SLP, TSHF Research Awards Committee Chair
The mission of the Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation (TSHF) is to improve the lives of people with communication disorders by supporting research, education, and service endeavors on their behalf. The purpose of the TSHF Research Awards Program is to promote research relevant to communication disorders by supporting Texas-based researchers in a variety of settings. While the amount of each award is not very large, it can be enough to explore the feasibility of a novel idea, to support the preliminary research needed to apply for a larger, nationally funded research project, or maybe to add onto a currently funded project to extend the findings. This year, TSHF was able to support five requests* and was so pleased to congratulate the award recipients in person at the TSHFoundation Breakfast during the Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Association (TSHA) 2022 Convention in Fort Worth. The 2022 research awardees are listed below:
The Tina E. Bangs Research Endowment was presented to Dr. Alison Prahl from Baylor University for her project, Strategies for Teaching Verbs for Bilingual and Monolingual Children.
The Elisabeth Wiig Research Award was presented to Matthew Randal, a doctoral student at The University of Texas at Austin, for his project entitled, The Effects of Covid-19 on Auditory Function.
The Lear Ashmore Research Endowment was presented to Dr. Zoi Gkalitsiou from The University of Texas at Austin for her project, Disfluency Manifestations in Middle- and Older-Age Bilingual Speakers.
The Presidents’ Research Endowment was awarded to Dr. Rocio Norman from the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, San Antonio in support of her project, Brain and Behavioral Indexes of Language Comprehension in Adults with Mild Traumatic Brain Injury.
Congratulations again to all of the 2022 TSHF Research Award recipients!
I would like to thank Dr. Patti Solomon-Rice from Our Lady of the Lake University for her continued help on this committee and also to thank all of you who continue to support the work of TSHF. Your generosity is what makes these research grants possible, and your investment does indeed make an impact.
One recent success story was featured in the TSHF newsletter. Dr. Mary Beth Schmitt from The University of Texas at Austin recently published an article in the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology entitled, “Peer Effects in Language Therapy for Preschoolers with Developmental Language Disorders: A Pilot Study,” which is work that was partially supported by the Tina E. Bangs Research Award. There are many such success stories, too numerous to describe in detail, but here are a few highlights from the progress reports of recent award recipients.
Dr. Boji Pak Wing Lam from University of North Texas provided an update on his project “Bilingual disadvantages in verbal fluency: New insights from abstract word retrieval and conceptual scoring,” which is still in progress. He reported that support from the TSHF Past Presidents Research Award allowed him to purchase assessment tools and recruit more than 30 participants for the study. The study focuses on emotional verbal fluency, a newly developed task that may expand neuropsychological assessment. Preliminary results obtained from the project highlight the need to perform dual-language testing in bilingual speakers because they produce highly variable responses in different languages tested. We look forward to hearing more from Dr. Lam when he has completed his work.
Dr. Zoi Gkalitsiou, from UT Austin, also reported on her progress on the Tina E. Bangs Research Award supported project, “Phonological and semantic false memories in children who stutter.” The project's aim is to investigate the phonological and semantic representations in children who stutter and their overall working memory ability compared to typically fluent children. Participants heard lists of words that were semantically, phonologically, or both semantically and phonologically (i.e., hybrid) related to a "key word" that was not present on the list. The number of words that were accurately recalled as well as the number of "key words" and the number of errors (i.e., false memories) were compared between children who stutter (CWS) and children do not (CWNS). Preliminary data suggest that CWS have difficulties with working memory and subvocal rehearsal when processing phonological information, as evidenced by fewer recalled words and more errors compared to CWNS in the phonological and the hybrid lists. No differences were found between the two groups in the semantic lists. Funding from the TSHF Research Program allowed for data collection, transcription, and coding for the study. While Dr. Gkalitsiou cautions that these results are preliminary. They suggest implications for the incorporation of phonological processing tasks into the assessment and treatment of stuttering.
A doctoral student at The University of Texas at Austin, Robyn Croft reported on her progress for the project entitled, “Is the influence of self-compassion on quality of life moderated by stuttering status and/or severity?,” which also received support from the Tina E. Bangs Research Award. The purpose of this study is to determine the influence of self-compassion, self-rated stuttering severity, and stuttering status (i.e., being a person who does or does not stutter) on quality of life. With this support from the TSHF and under the guidance of her mentor, Dr. Courtney Byrd, they have successfully recruited 79 adults who stutter. Preliminary findings reveal a significant, negative relationship between self-compassion and the impact of stuttering on quality of life, replicating the results from Croft and Byrd (2020). Further, their pilot data suggest this relationship is not moderated by self-perceived severity. Future comparative analysis of adults who do not stutter (in progress) will determine whether stuttering status uniquely moderates the relationship between self-compassion and quality of life in adults who do and do not stutter.
Lamar University professor Dr. Jamie Azios, a Lear Ashmore Award recipient, provided a preliminary summary of the results of her project entitled, Identifying Factors Related to the Maintenance and Dissolution of Friendship after Aphasia: Perspectives from Key Stakeholders. With the combined support from TSHF and the Tavistock Trust for Aphasia, Dr. Azios was able to purchase the tools needed to establish the data infrastructure and to create the interview guidelines, which included developing an aphasia-friendly version. Thus far, they have completed interviews with 28 people with aphasia, nine significant others, and nine friends. Dr. Azios and her colleagues presented a poster entitled,“Supporting Friendship in People Living with Aphasia: A Research Agenda,” at the 5th Annual The Herbert H. & Grace A. Dow College of Health Professions Research Symposium held at Central Michigan University in early April, and a poster entitled “People with aphasia want to keep their friends, so how do we help?,” at the International Aphasia Rehabilitation Conference in June, based on this work. Their findings suggest that several variables may influence the maintenance and dissolution of friendship networks in aphasia. Internal factors such as attitude, motivation, and social skills are associated with friendship ties in older adults. These internal factors also were revealed by people with aphasia as important factors for maintaining friends after aphasia. Potential causes of friendship loss included: (1) lack of reciprocity in friendships after aphasia, (2) increased maintenance and effort, (3) uncertainty about how to interact, and (4) changes to shared interests. In addition, their data suggest there are simple intervention techniques that can be incorporated into current therapy programs for people with aphasia. Some of these techniques in studies of friendship programs in older adults include practices such as motivational interviewing, which is beneficial in helping clients recognize their own needs in terms of maintaining friendships. The use of technology was another central theme in the interview data. People with aphasia, spouses, and friends who remained after aphasia onset all described innovative ways of staying connected during the early recovery period. Friends were especially influential in adapting communication contexts to support people with aphasia and spouses during the first few months after stroke when language was limited. People with aphasia and their friends found that social media allowed for activities that required minimal demands on language, which helped friends understand that the person with aphasia was “still there.” Dr. Azios and her team aim to complete the analysis of these data and submit this for publication soon, and we look forward to reading more about their results.
Once again, thank you to all of you who through your generous contributions make support of these and many more innovative and important research projects possible. The financial support is well used and very much needed. Finally, thank you to our research award recipients for their continued commitment and effort toward improving the lives of those with communication disorders.
*Due to the continued pandemic-related challenges with international travel, there were no applications for the Sandy-Friel Patti Research Travel award this year.