Communicative Disorders
Faculty Accomplishments
Dr. Christine Sapienza was invited to provide the KayPentax keynote lecture at ASHA November 2009.
On October 2, 2009, Sara S. Plager, M.Ed., Chief and Clinical Senior Lecturer, Speech Language Pathology, College of Public Health and Health Professions at the University of Florida participated in the first Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS) Clinic at the University of Florida. Other team members included Jennifer Miller, M.D., Pediatric Endocrinologist and Associate Director and Christy Hollywood Lynn, R.D./L.D.N., Pediatric Registered Dietitian and Research Study Coordinator in the UF College of Medicine, Division of Pediatric Genetics. A research study, “Natural History Study of Prader-Willi syndrome and Early Onset Morbid Obesity” is currently underway. Because of feeding difficulties early in life and later, speech difficulties, Mrs. Plager evaluates these children (who came from as far away as Maryland) and develops plans of care and specific recommendations for intervention and treatment.
Dr. Patricia Kricos has been elected as the President-Elect of the American Academy of Audiology, beginning her one year term July 1, 2010.
Dr. Lisa Edmonds was invited to speak at the International Neuropsychology Society Conference on February 13, 2009 in Atlanta GA. The symposium is entitled Principles of experience-dependent rehabilitation: From animals to aphasia treatment. Dr. Edmonds talk is entitled "The effect of Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) on sentence production in persons with aphasia."
Dr. Pat Kricos, audiologist, joined a total of twenty hearing care practitioners representing 14 nationalities in a unique collaborative seminar outside of Copenhagen, Denmark from the 16th-28th of January, 2009.
The Ida Institute convenes collaborative seminars specificallysupporting the non-profit educational institute’s commitment to fostering a better understanding of the human dynamics of hearing loss.
The seminar used clinical practice models, theories and management techniques from related healthcare disciplines and video of ethnographic interviews and theatrical scenarios highlighting the challenges and experiences in everyday practice to engage participating hearing care professionals in a collaborative process to develop a holistic approach to defining hearing.
‘We are pleased to have Dr. Kricos join us. The seminar is designed to take advantage of the professional and clinical experience of our participants, many of whom work in universities, public and private hearing care clinics. They along with our staff and faculty are essential for creating hearing healthcare tools and materials. In addition, Ida fellows are expected to implement local initiatives such as knowledge-sharing and networking exercises in the hearing care communities in which they work,’ stated Ida Institute Director Lise Lotte Bundesen.
“I am extremely honored to have been chosen to join the Ida Institute community. I have had the unique opportunity to meet and work with world renowned hearing healthcare professionals and I am confident our discussions should advance thinking about hearing loss and hearing care worldwide,” said Dr. Kricos.
About the Ida Institute
Established in 2007 with a grant from the Oticon Foundation, the Ida Institute is a non-profit independent educational institute located outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. Named in honor of Ida Emilie Demant, the wife of the foundation founder, the Institute serves as a catalyst for knowledge sharing and the development of innovative and practical tools. The Institute collaborates with hearing care professionals in helping hearing impaired people address the physical, psychological and social challenges of hearing loss.
Dr. Judy Wingate will serve as chair of the Conflict of Interest Committee for the ASHA Continuing Education Board from 2008-2010.
Dr. Jimmy Harnsberger has been an invited speaker giving exciting talks and workshops exploring the area of speech perception and speech forensics. Take Dr. Harnsberger's SPA 2024 to learn more about Forensic Applications for Speech Analysis.
- Harnsberger, J. D. "Exploring the consequences of the aging process on the articulation and perception of speech." Invited speaker at the Workshop on Vocal Aging Explained by Vocal Tract Modeling, John Hopkins University, August 4th, 2008.
- Testimony at Pentagon, before permanent Department of Defense staff and House of Representatives staffer William Natter, representing Rep. Ike Skelton (D - Missouri) of the House Armed Services committee concerning my research with Professor Harry Hollien on voice stress analyzers, Sept 11, 2008.
- Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment (DACA) Workshop on Emerging Technologies in Credibility Assessment, December, 2008.
Dr. Michael Tuccelli was the closing speaker at Early Childhood Symposium at the World Golf Village, St. Augustine Florida on September 27, 2008. His talk was "Been There, Done That" wrapping up the results of an early intervention and language intervention for young hearing impaired children with a word of encouragement to parents to make sure their children have language stimulation and appropriate auditory amplification.
Dr. Judith Wingate, CCC-SLP was given her 8th ASHA Award for Continuing Education (ACE) for 2008.
Congratulations to Dr. Judith Wingate on her new book, Healthy Singing by Plural Publishing. The book focuses on the voice rehabilitation needs of special groups of singers, such as public school music teachers and choral directors.
Dr. Linda Lombardino was invited to speak at the 2008 Wisconsin Speech and Hearing Association on The Role of the Speech-Language Pathologist in Assessing and Diagnosing Reading Disabilities and at the 2008 Illinois Speech and Hearing Association on Designing Reading Assessment Protocols for Children.
Patricia B. Kricos, Ph.D. Professor, Communicative Disorders, was recently elected as President of the Academy of Rehabilitative Audiology, with term of office to begin January 2008. The Academy of Rehabilitative Audiology is a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to fostering and stimulating education, research, and public interest in audiologic rehabilitation for children and adults with hearing loss.
Dr. WS Brown, Jr., professor in CD, was presented the Honors of the American Association of Phonetic Sciences at the Associations annual meeting in Boston, November 15, 2007. This inaugural award was presented to Dr. Brown for his scholarly contibutions, leadership and service to the mission of the phonetic sciences in America.
Dr. Jim Harnsberger will be presenting on November 12, 2007, as chair of the Linguistics and Speech Committee of the Credibility Assessment Research Summit in Fairfax, Virginia, a summary report entitled The Detection of Security-Relevant Information from Spoken Communication.
Congratulations to Dr. Pat Kricos. Dr. Kricos was awarded this memorial day weekend at the Florida Association of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists (FLASHA) conference the 2007 Clinical Career Award in recognition of her outstanding commitment to improving the care and services of the audiology practice.
Congratulations to Dr. Jay Rosenbek, Dr. Kenneth Heilman and Dr. Rahul Shrivastav for
their 2007 award from the University of Florida Research Opportunity fund for their
project: A new treatment for aprosodia caused by stroke.
A stroke involving the right hemisphere can impair a person's ability to impose emotional
tone of voice on the spoken word. This condition, called expressive aprosodia, can have
serious consequences for communication and human relationships Behavioral treatments
for expressive aprosodia are nearly nonexistent despite the fact that 30% of the
approximately 315,500 right hemisphere strokes each year may be affected by this
impairment. One reason for this neglect is that those with right hemisphere stroke
are notoriously hard to treat with traditional behavioral approaches because they
frequently are incapable of judging the adequacy of their own behaviors. This inability
makes it difficult or impossible for them to learn solely from someone's modeling an
appropriate response or merely telling them that what they have done is not right.
Therefore the purpose of this study is to measure the relative effects of a unique
behavioral treatment using special external feedback in the form of knowledge of
performance (KP), provided by a hardware and software program called Visi-Pitch IV, when
compared to a traditional behavioral approach without the special feedback (no-KP).
Congratulations to Dr. Pat Kricos on her recent election to a 3-year term on the American Academy of Audiology's Board of Directors. The Academy helps to shape the future of the audiology profession. Dr. Kricos nomination to the board is a testimony to her service in the audiology field as a research and teacher.
Patricia Kricos, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Communicative Disorders is one of two American audiologists competitively selected to participate in an Ida Institute seminar in Denmark in January. Established in 2007 with a $10 million grant from the William Demant and Wife Ida Emilie Foundation, the Ida Institute seeks to foster a better understanding of the human dynamics of hearing loss from its recognition to its resolution.
Dr. Bonnie Johnson was selected by The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) to attend the 2007 Lessons for Success Research Conference: Developing the Emerging Scientist. The conference will be held at the ASHA National Office, located in Rockville, Maryland on March 29-31, 2007.
Dr. Sam Brown was elected to serve as member of the University of Florida Senate. His term is from 2006-2008.
Dr. Lisa Edmonds was recently awarded a $5,000 research grant from the American Speech Language and Hearing Association called the The New Investigator Research Award. This award will support her project entitled " The effect of verb network strengthening treatment (VNeST) on crosslinguistic generalization of sentence production abilities in Spanish/English bilingual aphasia."
Congratulations to Dr. Lori Altmann for her role as investigator on a newly funded University of Florida Research Opportunity Fund for the project Effects of Tai Chi on Physical Performance, Functional Limitation and Disability. UF colleagues working with her on the study are Beverly L. Roberts, PhD., Principal investigator, Michael Marsiske, PhD., Co-investigator, Thomas Mulligan, MD., Co-investigator and James Jessup, PhD. The study examines the effects of a relatively intense TaiChi training program on the ability of olders adults with limited activity levels to maintain balance under single and dual task conditions in the lab and to perform various ADLs and IADLs. Lori will be designing & programming the cognitive tasks used in the investigation.
Dr. Altmann has also been awarded a $5000 Advancing Academic Research Careers award from the American Speech and Hearing Association for her project, "Grammatical Sentence Production in Alzheimer Disease."
Congratulations to Dr. Christine Sapienza and Dr. Rahul Shrivastav for their award from the University of Florida Research Opportunity fund for their project Application of Speech Recognition Technology for Measuring Speech Intelligibility in Patients with Parkinson's disease, which was awarded in 2007. The investigators propose using automatic speech recognition technology, which can help generate a reliable, easy-to-use, time- and cost-effective measure of speech intelligibility. The use of ASR technology will also provide a semi-automated means to describe various aspects of the PD patient's speech disorder (such as prosody, articulation, nasality or voice quality) and estimate the contribution of each to the overall communicative handicap or speech intelligibility deficit. Commercialization of the hardware and software of this ASR technology will allow researchers and clinicians to focus their energy upon rehabilitative efforts, rather than spend time in acquisition and analysis of speech data. Although the proposed research will focus on patients with Parkinson's disease, the resulting methods and algorithms may easily be modified to quantify speech intelligibility in patients with other speech disorders thus impacting a wide variety of patients seen within the healthcare system.
Dr. Pat Kricos was elected Chair of the Board of Governors of the American Board of Audiology. The American Board of Audiology (ABA) is dedicated to enhancing audiologic services to the public by promulgating universally recognized standards in professional practice. The ABA Board of Governors consists of seven elected members, whose work settings represent the diversity of audiology practice, one appointed representative of the American Academy of Audiology Board of Directors, one public member appointed by the ABA as well as the past Chair of the ABA in an ex officio capacity. audiologists. Board Certification in Audiology represents a commitment to professional standards, ethical practices, and continued professional development. The ABA also oversees the development of Specialty Recognition certification, the most recent of which is Specialty Recognition Certification for Cochlear Implants.
Dr. Kricos was also elected for a 3 year term on the Board of Directors of the Sigma Phi Omega (SP) National Honorary and Professional Society in gerontology in Higher Education. SPO seeks to promote scholarship, professionalism, friendship and services to older persons, and to recognize exemplary attainment in gerontology/aging studies.
Dr. Linda Lombardino and her colleagues R. Jane Lieberman and Jaumeiko Brown recently produced the test Assessment of Literacy and Language (ALL) available from PsychCorp, Division of Harcourt, San Antonio,Texas.
Dr. Lombardino was also recently honored with the Clinical Career Award for 2006 from the Florida Association of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists, in recognition of he routstanding contributions to improved care and service in the practice of speech-language pathology.
The second edition of Language Disorders across the Life Span, authored by CD clinical faculty member Betsy P. Vinson M.M.S., SLP is available from Delmar Publishing.