Three DeLTA Trainees have been awarded interdisciplinary grants to support their research. Hioji Ha (Psychological and Brain Sciences), Chaewon Park (Communication Sciences and Disorders), and Katie Pribyl (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 but 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.
There will be another competition announced early in fall.
Do You See What I Mean? fNIR-Based Hyperscanning During Face-to-face Visual Imagery Communication
PI: Hioji Ha
Mentors: Susan Cook and Ece Demir Lira
We communicate not just through words, but also through gestures— which provides a unique window onto speakers’ minds. Consequently, listeners are able to glean information that may not be said in speech. This research explores how hand gestures affect brain-to-brain coordination during conversation that involves visual imagery. In the study, speaker will describe detailed pictures to help their listener identify a specific image. These speakers are first asked to describe without instruction, which often leads to spontaneous gesture production. Then, they will be instructed to use hands or not to use hands during description. Using a brain imaging method fNIRS hyperscanning, we measure how speakers’ and listeners’ brain synchronize when gestures are present in four different outer-layer (cortical) parts of brain that are central to gesture and communication: posterior parietal cortex, somatosensory cortex, motor cortex, and left anterior temporal cortex. The goal is to see if gestures help people think and understand more quickly and effectively—and whether this is reflected not just in behavior but in the way their brains work together during real conversation. This interdisciplinary project combines neuroscience and communication research to better understand how we connect with one another through both speech and gesture.
The Relative Contributions of Phonology and Orthography in Written Word Recognition in Children with Dyslexia
PI: Chaewon Park
Mentors: Kristi Hendrickson and Leah Zimmermann
Non-fluent reading in childhood can negatively impact academic success, quality of life, and mental health. To effectively support individuals with dyslexia—a condition characterized by difficulties in accurate or fluent word recognition, spelling, and decoding— a fine-grained understanding of how they recognize written words is essential. While research has shown a strong link between dyslexia and phonological processing deficits (e.g., knowledge and application of letter-sound mapping rules for words of varying sizes), most findings rely on offline tasks that do not capture real-time processing. Recently, two eye-tracking studies revealed differences in how individuals with dyslexia process phonological and orthographic information during the early stages of word recognition—differences that were not reflected in offline assessments. However, how these components independently contribute to word recognition remains unclear. This study will use eye-tracking in the Visual World Paradigm to examine to what extent children with dyslexia, compared to typically developing readers, rely on phonological and orthographic information to identify written words in real-time. Through interdisciplinary collaboration across Communication Sciences and Disorders and Teaching and Learning in College of Education, this project aims to identify subtle differences in how children with dyslexia recognize written words. Findings may further contribute to the development of evidence-based reading interventions.
Evaluation of the Morphosyntactic Development of Monolingual Spanish Speaking Children with Hearing Aids.
PI: Katie Pribyl
Mentors: Beth Walker and Phillip Combiths
This study seeks to evaluate the use of morphological markers by Spanish-speaking children with hearing loss. The use of morphological markers may also provide evidence for one of two prominent theories of language development, the surface hypothesis and the optional infinitive approach (Leonard & Schroeder 2024; Werfel, 2018). The primary research questions are: 1) which morphological markers appear to be more difficult based on accuracy when order of acquisition is taken into account, 2) to what extent does perceptual access influence morphological acquisition in Spanish-speaking children who are hard of hearing, and 3) does the difficulty ranking differ between children with hearing loss and their typical hearing peers. Morpheme use will be evaluated through a play-based language sample, a morphological probe task, and the Spanish morphosyntax subtest of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA). Additionally, data on the children’s hearing loss and hearing aid verification will be collected. There will be three groups of children in consideration: children with hearing loss, MLUm-matched peers, and age-matched peers. Language data will be analyzed using the transcription software, CLAN, and compared with the children’s speech intelligibility index.