Two DeLTA Trainees have been awarded interdisciplinary grants to support their research through the DeLTA Center Interdisciplinary Grants Program.  Zach Demko (Psychological and Brain Sciences) and Melissa Hill (Communication Sciences and Disorders) each received funding for their excellent work! 

This was a competitive round, and decisions were difficult. All of the submissions were meritorious, but not all grants were selected for funding.  Congratulations to the three students!

Grants are reviewed by other DeLTA student members using an NIH study section model. Thanks to our anonymous but thoughtful reviewers for their excellent work this round.  See the Interdisciplinary Grants page for more information about this program.

Creating a novel assessment system to assess change in a latent externalizing construct across development while accounting for heterotypic continuity

PI: Zach Demko

Mentors: Isaac Petersen and Jake Oleson

Externalizing disorders, characterized by callousness and impulse control difficulties (e.g., antisocial
personality and substance use disorders), are prevalent, costly, and burdensome to individuals,
families, schools, and society. Understanding how and why some people develop persistent
externalizing behaviors is necessary to creating effective interventions. To answer these questions,
researchers must first accurately measure externalizing behaviors across development. This is
challenging, because the way an underlying externalizing construct is expressed in, for example,
young children (e.g., as temper tantrums) is different than the way it is expressed in older children
or adolescents (e.g., as truancy or heavy alcohol use). We will develop a parent-report
questionnaire for assessing externalizing behavior cross-sectionally across infancy to adolescence.
We will do so using both unique questionnaire items for particular ages (e.g., temper tantrums for
early ages and substance use for older ages) and core items across all ages (e.g., meanness). We
will use Bayesian modeling to link questionnaire scores at different ages onto the same scale.
Building tools for more accurate measurement of externalizing across a lengthy development span
will permit stronger research into its underlying mechanisms. This knowledge ultimately will lead to
improved interventions for healthy minds.

Mismatch of text complexity in grade-school curricula and standardized language assessments

PI: Melissa Hill

Mentor: Stewart McCauley

Language in the school-age years is assumed to develop largely from exposure to increasingly complex language in the educational environment. However, the language students are exposed to may not be as complex as is typically assumed and may not match up with the linguistic structures and concepts tested on standardized assessments used for classification of language disorders and general educational benchmarks. If the language in school curricula is not congruent with that tested on standardized assessments, students may be assumed to have weak language skills, despite having little opportunity to learn such language. There is reason to doubt the congruity of language in curricula and assessments, as curriculum designers prioritize text readability to facilitate comprehension of content. This proposal seeks to determine whether the language tested in clinical and educational standardized assessments reflects the complexity of language in school curricula. Both curricular texts and clinical/educational standardized assessments will be digitized and analyzed for micro/macrolinguistic complexity using computational methods. Measures will be compared to determine whether linguistic complexity is similar across texts and assessments. Additionally, these measures will be tracked with grade level to determine how linguistic complexity changes with grade level, and compared across subjects, given genre differences.