CUNY GC PhD Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences

The new Promoting Equity in Aphasia Research & Care (PEARC /perk/) group, a collaboration between Jose Centeno, Chaleece Sandberg, Eve Higby, Michelle Gravier, and several friends with post-stroke aphasia, is looking for caregivers of Latinx persons with aphasia for our current study. Please help us spread the word.

Acoustical Society - Student Poster Award Recipient: Danilo Lombardo

My name is Danilo Lombardo. I am a PhD student in the Speech-Language-Hearing sciences program at the Graduate Center. I am a member of the Speech Production, Acoustics, and Perception Laboratory directed by Dr. Doug Whalen.

My research focuses on how the vowels and consonants of different languages are produced by the movements of the tongue, the lips, and the jaw. I am also studying how our ear and our brain perceive different speech sounds when we are babies and when we are adults.

At the Acoustical Society of America conference in Denver last May 2022, I presented a study on the sound /s/ in American English. We discovered that the friction noise that we produce during /s/ changes depending on the position in the syllable. This result will have multiple exciting applications, from improving speech therapy to understanding the evolution of English compared to ancient languages like Latin.

My decision to do research in speech and hearing sciences was inspired by my previous experiences as a teacher of foreign languages. While I was teaching French to international students in France, I had first-hand experience of the difficulties that adults face to pronounce the sounds of a new language, and I wanted to help improve teaching methods.

I come from a background in Linguistics and Classics, having studied Latin and Ancient Greek, which is also an inspiring part of my work on the evolution of speech sounds of Classic languages. Before coming to the City University of New York, I studied in Paris, where I obtained an MA in Linguistics from the University of Paris 7 - Diderot, where I specialized in Phonetics and Phonology, which is the scientific study of speech sounds. I also own a BA in French and a certificate in Teaching French as a Foreign Language from Upem University.

GC Dissertation Year Fellowship Recipient: Rion Iwasaki

My Profile

I am Rion Iwasaki, a level three Ph.D. student in the program of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences. I am a member of Speech Production, Acoustics, and Perception Laboratory, directed by Dr. Douglas H. Whalen.

I am from Tokyo, Japan, and my name Rion (理音) is written with Chinese characters meaning “reason” (理) and “sounds” (音). Coincidently, I am interested in speech sounds. I am particularly interested in the relationship between the movements of articulators and resultant speech sounds, how this relationship differs across languages, and how it could evolve over time.

My project

My dissertation project concerns tongue articulation associated with so-called devoiced vowels in Tokyo Japanese. Producing vowels typically involves phonation and vowel-specific tongue articulation (as well as lip configurations). However, in Tokyo Japanese, high vowels, [i] and [u], are devoiced—produced without phonation—with high frequency in certain phonological contexts. There is a long-standing controversy in the literature on whether devoiced vowels also lack tongue articulation, meaning that they are actually deleted in this case. I am using ultrasound imagining to see how the tongue moves during the articulation of devoiced vowels and compare it against the tongue articulation for its voiced counterparts. Ultrasound imagining is a non-invasive technique to see body parts and has been applied in speech production research to see the tongue surface mostly from the midsagittal plane.

If devoiced vowels are deleted, the tongue articulation should differ between devoiced and voiced vowels. Devoiced vowels being deleted imply that a sound change might be coming in Tokyo Japanese. Japanese typically has only open syllables where a single consonant precedes a vowel. However, the deletion of devoiced vowels implies that Japanese might be permitting certain types of consonant clusters in syllable-initial position in the contexts where vowel devoicing occurs.

The recent refugee crisis in Europe with Ukrainians entering surrounding countries provides an example of why we, as Speech, Language, Hearing scientists, need to focus studies on the communication skills of refugees. Refugees are displaced for many reasons (war, famine, corruption, etc.) but they all face the similar challenge of being able to communicate in their new homelands. For example, it is a challenge to decide what school grade is appropriate for a refugee child who speaks a foreign language. We can contribute in a big way to this major need of refugees: that is, assessment and intervention for speech, language and hearing deficits and increasing understanding of the challenges faced by refugees in second language learning.



We, in the US have largely ignored refugee crises in Europe (Syria, Afghanistan), but are now taking some interest in Ukraine. This is an opportunity for us to add European languages, in addition to those of the Middle East and Asia, to our radar of research interests. European groups have focused on questions of the language barrier for refugees (for example, Multimind https://www.multilingualmind.eu/policy-reports). We should consider adding a concern for refugees' communication skills as a focus of our community here in the U.S. I challenge you (our colleagues, alumni, and students) to find the existing organizations in the US and to post them here.



We should also start a discussion about what we can organize to support second language learning in refugees here in the New York City region and to help refugees obtain the services that they need.

Policy reports | MultiMind This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No 765556.

Language and Cognition
University Seminar #681

Meeting of March 24, 2022

“Drawing on linguistics
in cognitive aging and dementia research

Jet M.J. Vonk
Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain
Department of Neurology, Columbia University

Language is an integral part of our lives and the way in which we use language is often seen by others as an index of our level of cognitive and intellectual functioning. The better we understand the complicated domain of language in aging and health, the better our future applications will be for early diagnosis and prevention, validity of cognitive tests, and therapy and intervention for dementia. This seminar will discuss 1) the neurobiology and trajectory of semantic memory impairment in healthy aging and dementia, and 2) the identification of novel cognitive markers based on linguistic theory and advanced modeling techniques.

Place: A Zoom Meeting

Time: 4:00 PM

RSVP: If you will attend the meeting on March 24, please send a note to:

Leah Christman, Rapporteur
[email protected]

The Rapporteur will send a Zoom invitation to you by return email message.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2021.706926/full

Language Learning Under Varied Conditions: Neural Indices of Speech Perception in Bilingual Turkish-German Children and in Monolingual Children With Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) Lateral temporal measures of the auditory evoked potential (AEP) including the T-complex (positive Ta and negative Tb), as well as an earlier negative peak (Na) index maturation of auditory/speech processing. Previous studies have shown that these measures distinguish neural processing in children w...

https://www.gc.cuny.edu/News/All-News/Detail?id=60673

‘One Hell of a Learning Experience’: How COVID Nearly Upended a Student’s Dissertation Research Like many doctoral students, Iris Strangmann had to reimagine how she would conduct an in-person experiment when such activities were banned in New York.

This past week's colloquium with Laura Spinu of Kingsborough Community College