Emily Opramolla has successfully completed her Honors thesis titled “Tracking the time course of distributional learning for talker-specific phonetic variation.” You know it’s official when the Honors bell has been rung – congratulations, Emily!

Congratulations to Julia Drouin, who has received the Ph.D. Fellowship from the Council of Academic Programs in Communication Sciences and Disorders. The title of her grant is “Optimization of auditory training for cochlear implant users.” Congrats, Julia!

We extend a warm welcome to Nikole Giovannone, who will join the SLaP Lab as a Ph.D. student this fall. Nikole is currently an Honors scholar at Mount Holyoke College, working in the lab of Dr. Mara Breen. Nikole will join us as a Jorgensen Fellow. Recipients of the Jorgensen Fellowship represent the very best applicants to graduate programs at UConn, and we couldn’t be more excited to welcome her to our group!

Divya presented her SHARE project titled “Effects of talker-specific phonetic variation on voice recognition” at the 2018 Frontiers in Undergraduate Research exhibition. Well done, Divya!

Emma presented her SURF project titled “Neural determinants of phonetic category structure in children” at the 2018 Frontiers in Undergraduate Research exhibition. Well done, Emma!

Congratulations to Julia Drouin, who successfully completed her general examination, in which she defended her paper on “Optimization of auditory training for cochlear implant users.” This is a major milestone on the path to the Ph.D.; next stop, the prospectus. Congrats, Julia!

Dr. Theodore will begin serving as an Associate Editor at Language and Speech in April 2017.

Dr. Theodore has received a 3-year grant from the NIH NIDCD to examine phonetic category structure in individuals with and without specific language impairment (LI). Specific language impairment (LI) is a common child learning disorder that can persist into adulthood and puts individuals at risk for other disabilities including learning disability, reading disability, and failure to thrive in academic environments. The proposed research will use fMRI neuroimaging and behavioral methods to compare phonetic category structure in individuals with and without LI with respect to (1) how phonetic category structure is represented in the brain and (2) how phonetic category structure is dynamically modified as a consequence of exposure to phonetic variation. These findings will result in improved specification of the etiology of LI, which can be used to develop more targeted rehabilitation protocols. The title of the grant is “Determinants of phonetic category structure in language impairment.”