Devin Roscillo and MaryKate Bisaillon presented a poster at the recent Acoustical Society of America meeting in San Francisco.  They were funded by a travel award from the UConn Office of Undergraduate Research.  They did a great job!

Minal Kadam, an M.A. student conducting her thesis research in the SLaP Lab, was featured on UConn Today!  Minal is part of a program at the YMCA in Hartford run by our collaborator and department chair, Dr. Bernard Grela.  The program supports reading rehabilitation in adults with dyslexia.  Minal’s thesis research examines perceptual processing in this population.

Lab members MaryKate Bisaillon and Devin Roscillo have received travel awards from the UConn Office of Undergraduate Research.  They will use this award to present research at the meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Francisco, California this coming December. Congratulations, we can’t wait to see your poster!

The SLaP Lab has been awarded a research grant from the UConn Speech and Hearing Clinic!  This grant will fund research that examines perceptual processing in adults with dyslexia and will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Bernard Grela, chair of the SLHS department.  This award includes research assistant funds for two honors students, Katlyn Salvador and Rebecca Sylvia, who are completing their honors theses in the SLaP Lab.

Janice Lomibao successfully defended her M.A. thesis today!  The title of her thesis is “Talker-specific influences on phonetic boundaries and internal category structure.”  Her project has been accepted for presentation at an upcoming meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.  We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors!

It’s the end of the inaugural year of the UConn Laboratory for Spoken Language Processing. We’re excited that it’s been such a productive – and fun – time. We’re continuing a tradition that started in Dr. Joanne L. Miller’s lab, where Dr. Theodore did her Ph.D. research.  The ritual is to celebrate each successful grant proposal and each defense with a bottle of Champagne.  Our collection is already growing with two successful intramural grants and two M.A. defenses.  Why 5 bottles?  Well, the ’66 Bordeaux is how Dr. Theodore celebrated the lab being opened!

Jean Campbell successfully defended her M.A thesis today.  Jean’s thesis is titled “Contextual influences on phonetic categorization in developmental populations” and represents the culmination of a year-long project in the SLaP Lab.  We’re so proud of her and wish her all the best in her future career!

Congratulations to Katlyn Salvador who has just received a SHARE award!  The SHARE award is sponsored by the Office of Undergraduate Research and will fund Katlyn’s work in the lab for the Spring 2013 semester.  This is a competitive award and we’re really proud that one of our students was selected.  Katlyn will use this award to begin working on her honors thesis.  She plans on examining talker familiarity effects on word recognition in adults with dyslexia.

The SLaP Lab has been awarded a Faculty Large Grant from the UConn Research Foundation.  The title of the project is “A Pilot Study to Examine Accommodation of Phonetic Variability in Children with Specific Language Impairment.”  This research will examine how children with and without language disorders extract speech sound categories (i.e., consonants and vowels) from the acoustic speech signal.  Part of this award will fund a graduate assistantship for Jean Campbell who is completing her Master’s thesis in the SLaP Lab.

The SLaP Lab has received a grant from the UConn Speech and Hearing Clinic to examine the role of auditory and visual variability on word learning in children with and without hearing loss.  We are collaborating with Dr. Kristin Vasil-Dilaj who has expertise in pediatric audiology and children with cochlear implants.  Families who are interested in participating in this research can view the recruitment materials here.