Jamaica Projects

  • Using Drawings to Understand Jamaican Children’s Talking Experiences 
    • Recent evidence suggests that drawings offer SLPs an unbiased approach for working with typically-developing and disordered children across language contexts (Holliday et al., 2009; McCormack et al., 2010; McLeod et al., 2015)
    • We explored the talking experiences of young children who speak more than one language on a daily basis.

  • Characterizing Grammar Profiles Using Child and Adult Models
    • Without specific knowledge of dual language profiles, dual language learners are at-risk for misdiagnosis.
    • The purpose of this study is to investigate the appropriateness of standardized assessments of expressive language in Jamaican Creole (JC)-and English-speaking preschoolers. 
    • We sought to inform the interpretation of assessment results based on adult models from the same linguistic community. 

  • Using Acoustic Methods to Characterize Speech Productions
    • We seek to understand and characterize the various productions of single words by Jamaican Creole (JC)-and English-speaking preschoolers.  
    • The purpose of this NIH-funded study is to build models of speech sound productions for this population and help with diagnostic accuracy.  
    • We use the Phon 3 software program and Praat functions for speech analysis of acoustic data.  

  • Intelligibility in Context Scale as an Assessment Tool
    • The Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS; McLeod, et al., 2012) is a validated speech screening tool that has been translated to Jamaican Creole (JC). 
    • We investigated the clinical utility of the ICS and ICS-JC for English and JC-speaking bilingual preschoolers. 
    • We address the need for research-based screening tools for understudied bilingual populations.
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Child's drawing
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Child with their drawing
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Parent filling out the ICS Form

Pictures from our 2019 Jamaica group

fMRI Projects

The lab utilizes behavioral techniques and neuroimaging technologies (mainly fMRI and Diffusion Imaging) to examine patterns of development and disorders across three separate, but related studies.
  • Study 1 – Development and Validation
    • Summary: We developed and later revised a novel 20-item computer-based language production task, the Sentence Completion Expressive Language Task (SCELT-P; Washington et al., 2013; 2018) for the neuroimaging environment. Although not designed to diagnose language ability, the SCELT-P was validated on data from 82 English-speaking 4- to 5-year olds (69 TD; 13 DLD) with notable psychometric properties: high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha α=.83), high-to-very-high (ps< .001) test-retest, r=.87 and inter-rater, r=.99 reliability, and moderate, rs=.53 to .71 to high construct validity, between scores on prompted and spontaneous language measures and scores on the SCELT-P (Washington et al., 2014; 2015; 2018). Children respond to the SCELT-P program using a cloze procedure with a passive “listen” and active “speak” condition, requiring that they complete a simple sentence using a particular syntactic frame
  • Study 2 – Feasibility
    • Summary: Fourteen 4-to-5-year olds, developing-typically (n=9) or with DLD (n=5), participated in a feasibility study for a new fMRI paradigm that included a valid and reliable computer-based expressive-language task, the SCELT-P©. Eighty-six percent of typically developing and 80% of DLD preschoolers successfully completed the paradigm. we examined pairwise connectivity among a priori Regions of Interest (ROIs) proposed to be part of the procedural network (inferior frontal gyri, motor cortex, SMA, basal ganglia (caudate and putamen) and cerebellum). Four-to-five year olds with DLD demonstrated reduced connectivity compared to TD age-matched peers during a the SCELT-P task. Suggestions for improved performance are considered along with implications of these findings.
  • Study 3 – Understanding variation in response to treatment
    • Summary: Children with developmental language disorders (DLD, aka specific language impairment), one of the most common disorders in young children, experience hallmark grammar deficits. While there are effective intervention programs for addressing these grammar deficits, not all children respond to these treatments.  Our traditional behavioral approaches to measuring outcomes following intervention have been insufficient in explaining why the variation in response to treatment occurs and as such, this project uses neuroimaging to describe this variation, with the goal to identify the brain mechanisms that support grammatical learning and how they relate to response to treatment in preschoolers with DLD.

Pictures from the fMRI Project

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Group Activation Map - Typically Developing
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Group Activation Map - Developmental Language Disorders (DLD, aka Specific Language Impairment)