Congratulations to Nick Monto, a Ph.D. student in the SLaP Lab, who has just been accepted as an IGERT Associate!  The Language Plasticity IGERT at UConn is an interdisciplinary training program funded by the NSF designed to foster research and graduate training across cognitive (linguistics, psychology, communication disorders) and biological (behavioral and molecular neuroscience and genetics) approaches to language research.

Congratulations to Julia Drouin, SLaP Lab Ph.D. student, who has been accepted to the NIH-funded “Training Course in fMRI” at the University of Michigan. This 2-week intensive training will be very influential in advancing Julia’s research expertise. Well done!

Be on the lookout for a new paper to appear in JSLHR! The title is “Examination of the locus of positional influences on children’s production of plural -s: Considerations from local and global speech planning.” This work was completed with Dr. Katherine Demuth at Macquarie University and Dr. Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Be on the lookout for a new paper to appear in AP&P! The title is “Attention modulates specificity effects in spoken word recognition: Challenges to the time-course hypothesis.” This work was completed with Dr. Sheila E. Blumstein and Sahil Luthra at Brown University.

Congratulations to Emily Thompson, who has just received a SPARC award from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.  This is a mentored award that will provide Emily with an opportunity to foster her teaching and research skills under the direction of Dr. Theodore.  Emily is conducting her Honors research in the SLaP Lab, which examines perceptual learning in adults with dyslexia.  Well done, Emily!

Dr. Theodore is a winner of the 2014 Honors Core Course Competition sponsored by the UConn Honors Program Office for Curriculum, Assessment, and Planning.  She will be developing a new offering for the Honors Core, a set of classes that aim to combine different perspectives and diverse problem-solving expertise to study important challenging themes and issues.  The title of her course is “Introduction to communication disorders:  Interdisciplinary perspectives from brain to behavior.”

The SLaP Lab was well represented at the Providence ASA meeting!  Dr. Theodore chaired and presented in a special session for Speech Communication.  M.A. students, Kelly Casey and Shayna Marmon, presented their poster on word learning in children.

Congratulations to SLaP Lab undergraduates, Rebecca Sylvia and Heather McSherry, who have successfully completed their research requirements for the Honors program.  The title of Rebecca’s thesis is “Locus of phonological deficits in adults with dyslexia.”  The title of Heather’s thesis is “Effects of speaking rate and place of articulation on phonetic categorization in children.”  Dr. Theodore is so proud of both of you and looks forward to seeing all of your future accomplishments!

Joslynn Noyes successfully defended her M.A. thesis today!  The title of her thesis is “Effects of reading ability on perceptual flexibility in spoken language processing.”  Her project will be presented at the upcoming meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.  We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors!

Emily Thompson, Katlyn Salvador, and Lisa Brody have each received a SURF award from the Office for Undergraduate Research.  This competitive award will fund their involvement in research projects during the summer.  Their faculty sponsors are Dr. Erika Skoe (Brody) and Dr. Rachel Theodore (Thompson, Salvador).  Congratulations – well done!