Our project titled “A causal framework of communicative participation in people with Parkinson’s disease” has been funded by an NIH R01 Award. This project investigates conversation challenges for people with Parkinson’s disease and identifies hypothesis-driven treatment targets to effectively improve conversation. The Co-Is supporting this project are: Tyson Barrett, Visar Berisha, and Julie Liss.

We have received an Impact Award from the Parkinson’s Foundation for our project examining the combined effects of speaker and listener treatment approaches on intelligibility outcomes for people with Parkinson’s disease. This work is in collaboration with Kaity Lansford (PI) and Tyson Barrett (Co-I).

Human Interaction Lab Ph.D. student, Camille Wynn, has been awarded an NIH F31 predoctoral fellowship (Sponsor: Borrie). Her project will investigate conversational entrainment and interaction success in typically-developing adolescent conversations and in conversations of adolescents with ASD. Exciting work to come!

The NIH has funded our R21 project on perceptual training of dysarthric speech. We will identify speaker and listener parameters that allow training paradigms to be optimized for intelligibility outcomes in dysarthria rehabilitation. This work is in collaboration with Kaitlin Lansford (CoPI) and Tyson Barrett (CoI).

The NIH has funded our R21 project on the application of ideal binary masking to dysarthria speech. We will investigate the use of signal processing techniques to overcome speech-in-noise difficulties for listeners (with and without hearing loss) understanding dysarthria. This work is in collaboration with Sarah Yoho Leopold (PI).

Camille Wynn, a PhD student in the Human Interaction Lab, was recently awarded $10,000 through the ASHFoundation New Century Doctoral Scholarship. This is a highly competitive national award designed to support strong doctoral candidates who have demonstrated academic excellence.

Michelle Parker presented her research as a USU Ignite talk titled, “With or Without Vocal Fry, Unique Voices Are In.” The talk was a huge success and the online video will post soon. Watch this space!

“People modify their behaviors to more closely align with others,” said Stephanie Borrie. Check out more of Borrie’s insights in a recent piece in TIME, entitled “You asked: What is Vocal Fry?” Found at: www.time.com/5006345/what-is-vocal-fry/