UVM Communication Sciences and Disorders

More graduation fun - congrats CSD class of 2026! 🎓

Still smiling after celebrating our incredible CSD graduate and undergraduate students at graduation last weekend 🎓✨ We are so proud of all of your hard work, growth, and accomplishments. We can’t wait to see the impact you’ll make in the world of communication sciences and disorders! 💙

Go, Dr. Benham! 🎉🙌💚

Tiny tots are donning cameras to help advance research at the University of Vermont. They’re part of a study focused on speech-language disorders and early detection in toddlers. - https://www.wcax.com/2026/05/12/uvm-researches-speech-language-disorder-kids/

As we close out another semester here at the Eleanor M. Luse Center (our on-campus speech, language, and hearing clinic), we want to extend a huge THANK YOU to our incredible clients and families. 💙 Thank you for trusting us to be part of your journeys, for showing up each week with hard work and smiles, and for helping our graduate student clinicians learn and grow into compassionate future professionals. We can't wait to see what next semester brings! 👏🎉 #uvm #cnhs #slp

https://www.uvm.edu/cnhs/news/uvm-faculty-and-students-team-toddler-research

Our own Communication Sciences and Disorders professor Dr. Sara Benham teams up with Engineering students in the design lab to create a lightweight, durable toddler headcam—a custom research tool that captures children’s visual experience as they explore their world.

This innovative project supports research on how early visual input connects to language development, blending student creativity, hands-on design, and cutting-edge communication science.

Video credit: Chris Dissinger

UVM Faculty and Students Team Up on Toddler Research | College of Nursing and Health Sciences | The University of Vermont show the image caption close caption Professor Sara Benham (right) and SEED Program Director Keith Epstein (left) with students in the design lab. Photos and video by Chris Dissinger. UVM Faculty and Students Team Up on Toddler Research What happens when early childhood research meets senior enginee...

So proud of our CSD 2nd year graduate students who presented their research at the CNHS Ziegler Research Forum this morning! This is the last step before graduating next weekend! 🎓

CSD undergrad senior Freddie Tagupa also delivered an exciting data blitz where she shared her findings regarding Question Sequences in Conversational Narrative Impacted by Alzheimer’s Dementia. 🎉

Last but not least we also had a fantastic keynote speaker, Dr. Jana Iverson from Boston University who spoke to us about Developmental Cascades in Infancy and the intersection of On Time mobility and how this drives meaningful developmental change. ✨

Another exciting update from this semester!! 🎉 We’re thrilled to highlight the Go Baby Go initiative which was an exciting interprofessional collaboration between Speech-Language Pathology, Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, and Biomedical Engineering students! Together, we designed and adapted ride-on vehicles with alternative access methods, opening the door for young children of all abilities to experience independent mobility, exploration, and play. This project was a vibrant example of what’s possible when disciplines come together - sparking innovation, breaking down barriers, and creating meaningful change so every body has the opportunity to move, engage, and thrive. ❤️👏🚗 #slp #cnhs #uvm #csd #gobabygo

We’re catching up on some exciting things happening around CSD this past month! ✨

Last week, Dr. Tiffany Hutchins, Dr. Ashley Brien, and research assistants Alex and Kevin traveled to Prague to present their work at the annual conference hosted by the International Society for Autism Research - one of the world’s leading scientific meetings focused on autism research.

We’re so proud of this amazing team! 👏 Check out a snapshot of their research below ⬇️

"In this study, we assessed whether autistic people rely more on formulaic (i.e., stored word sequences used in relatively fixed forms, including figures of speech and social scripts) or analytic language processing styles when participating in a sentence completion task. Consistent with well-documented strengths in analytic reasoning in autism, we found that autistic participants provided a greater number of less conventional, though still lexically and grammatically correct, responses than matched non-autistic peers. Our findings have implications for how language assessments are interpreted when administered to autistic individuals. Furthermore, results suggest that people with autism employ both analytic and formulaic processing styles as dependent upon the demands of the communicative context (small talk, storytelling, written expression, etc.). Future research should examine how autistic people use formulaic language in everyday speech through conversation analysis"