Richard J. Morris’s research while affiliated with Florida State University and other places

Recent evidence indicates that acoustic features associated with emotional prosody in speech may be an inexpensive, non-invasive method for differentiating among dementia types. In particular, frequency measures in the speech of people with dementia have been associated with listeners’ perception of emotional prosody. The purpose of this study was to determine if second formant (F2) transition information would enhance these differentiations. Prerecorded speech samples of Cookie Theft picture descriptions from 10 individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (DAT), 5 with vascular dementia (VaD), 9 with MCI, and 10 neurologically healthy controls (NHC) were obtained from the DementiaBank. Nine words that had initial obstruent consonants that occurred at least two times in each of the participant groups were selected for measurement. The F2 durations, extents, and slope were measured and analyzed. Across group comparisons revealed no pattern for F2 durations or extents. The fricatives had longer F2 durations than the plosives. Across word comparisons revealed significant differences across the consonant vowel combinations for all three measures. A group by word interaction occurred for the F2 slope with the VaD group exhibiting larger slopes than the other two groups.

It is known that older adults have difficulty comprehending affective prosody. However, it is unclear how well they manipulate affective prosody to express emotion. Five older adults were recorded when they completed three speech tasks: (1) Talking about happy and sad life events; (2) Describing the Refused Umbrella pictures; (3) Explaining how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Two independent investigators listened to the recordings and parsed them into utterances considering pauses and connectivity. Afterwards, the investigators identified the primary emotion (i.e., happy, sad, neutral) in each utterance. The recordings were acoustically analyzed using Pratt for rate, pitch, and amplitude measures. The rate measures included speech and articulation rates and the pitch/amplitude measures contained initial, final, minimum, maximum f0/dB and the difference between the maximum and minimum f0/dB. Multivariate ANOVAs with Tukey post-hoc test were conducted to analyze the acoustic data. Among the acoustic measures, all rate and pitch measures were significantly different across the three emotions. However, none of the amplitude measures differed significantly. Research on production of affective prosody in healthy older adults has been scarce and this study may serve as a catalyst for further exploration in this area.

Over the past 80 years’ university administrators have exhibited flexibility in their responses to evolving government funding patterns. One possible factor in these changes is the consequences of policy decisions at the federal and state government levels that have resulted in institution wide policy decisions in colleges and universities. These policy decisions have affected department policies and faculty member behaviors. Utilizing institutional Theory allows a discussion of the effect that government policy decisions have on responses within the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). In this manner, Institutional Theory can be used to discuss how university administrative decisions have affected instruction in the United States—a case that can illuminate on policy and governance in HEIs across the globe and the implications these issues have on infusing critical thinking in higher education pedagogy. In the case of the US presented in this study, government funding patterns of the past 60 years have resulted in university policy decisions that have adversely affected the classroom experiences of students and created environments that do not elicit the same level of thinking from students. Being aware of the cascading effects of these patterns can help key stakeholders in universities to adjust policies to improve instruction and student thinking patterns.

Introduction This pilot research was designed to investigate if prosodic features from running spontaneous speech could differentiate dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (DAT), vascular dementia (VaD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and healthy cognition. The study included acoustic measurements of prosodic features (Study 1) and listeners’ perception of emotional prosody differences (Study 2). Methods For Study 1, prerecorded speech samples describing the Cookie Theft picture from 10 individuals with DAT, 5 with VaD, 9 with MCI, and 10 neurologically healthy controls (NHC) were obtained from the DementiaBank. The descriptive narratives by each participant were separated into utterances. These utterances were measured on 22 acoustic features via the Praat software and analyzed statistically using the principal component analysis (PCA), regression, and Mahalanobis distance measures. Results The analyses on acoustic data revealed a set of five factors and four salient features (i.e., pitch, amplitude, rate, and syllable) that discriminate the four groups. For Study 2, a group of 28 listeners served as judges of emotions expressed by the speakers. After a set of training and practice sessions, they were instructed to indicate the emotions they heard. Regression measures were used to analyze the perceptual data. The perceptual data indicated that the factor underlying pitch measures had the greatest strength for the listeners to separate the groups. Discussion The present pilot work showed that using acoustic measures of prosodic features may be a functional method for differentiating among DAT, VaD, MCI, and NHC. Future studies with data collected under a controlled environment using better stimuli are warranted.

People with cognitive impairment are known to have difficulty expressing and understanding the emotion carried in speech. However, it is unclear how this difficulty affects neurotypical listeners perception of the emotion expressed by those with cognitive impairments. This study was designed to explore whether neurotypical listeners perceive emotion expressed by people with cognitive impairment differently, compared to that expressed by neurotypical older adults. For this study, speech samples describing the Cookie Theft picture of 10 people with dementia of the Alzheimer's type, 9 with mild cognitive impairment, 5 with vascular dementia, and 10 healthy neurotypical older adults were obtained from the DementiaBank. A total of 28 neurotypical listeners evaluated the emotion they perceived in each utterance of the speech samples. Although the listeners rated most of the utterances non-emotional (i.e., neutral), they identified different patterns of emotional prosody for each speaker group. The outcome of this study implies possible communication breakdowns between people with cognitive impairments and their neurotypical communication partners.

This research examines the nature, enactment, and assessment of Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) models in the United States and South Korea to highlight lessons and strategies that Kenya can utilize to improve CBC implementation. A scoping review of various databases was conducted to search for peer-reviewed articles documenting empirical evidence on implementing and assessing CBC education models in the USA, South Korea, and Kenya. Two researchers from each country screened, extracted the data, and evaluated the records using a custom quality rating scale following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension checklist for scoping reviews. Evidence from the USA and South Korea indicated that the implementation of CBC resulted in improved problem-solving skills, lifelong learning skills, self-efficacy, and autonomy in learners. There is limited evidence from Kenya on the effect of CBC models on learners’ key competencies. Challenges in the three countries include lack of teacher training opportunities, low funding for implementation, inconsistent pedagogical approaches and assessment techniques. The Kenyan government and education stakeholders can address the CBC implementation challenges by using evidence from other studies and countries on teacher training and aligning goals at the school, local authority, regional authority, and national levels.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of the first semester of a speech-language pathology (SLP) graduate program on the level of student self-efficacy for a set of clinical tasks across a variety of communication disorders. Method In this study, 60 SLP graduate students participated. They were in two sections of a required first-semester course at a single university. They completed a custom-made self-efficacy scale at the beginning and end of their first semester of graduate school. The self-efficacy scale was administered as a Qualtrics survey, with participant ratings of 14 clinical skills for 12 communication disorders. As part of both administrations of the survey, the participants also provided their number of evaluation and treatment observation hours as well as their evaluation and treatment practicum hours. Descriptive statistics and mixed-effects regression models were used to analyze the data. Results The data indicated that a semester of graduate school and clinical practice increased the students' self-efficacy across all 12 communication disorders. The regression analysis confirmed that all of the clinical tasks differed significantly by when the survey was completed, with the higher self-efficacy scores occurring at the end of the semester. It also revealed that student self-efficacy scores increased by 1 point with each clinical diagnostic hour the students completed. Conclusions Completing a semester of graduate school resulted in increased self-efficacy in this group of students. The increased self-efficacy spread across a range of disorder types and across a variety of evaluation and treatment tasks.

No PDF available ABSTRACT This study was designed to explore whether neurotypical listeners perceive emotion expressed by people with cognitive impairment differently, compared to that expressed by neurotypical older adults. For this study, speech samples describing the Cookie Theft picture, of 11 people with dementia of the Alzheimer’s type, 9 individuals with mild cognitive impairment, 5 people with vascular dementia, and 10 healthy age- and education-matched older adults were obtained from the Dementia TalkBank. Then, 28 listeners evaluated emotion expressed in each utterance of the speech samples. The listeners differently perceived emotion expressed by the four groups. The outcomes of this study implies possible communication breakdowns among people with cognitive impairments.

No PDF available ABSTRACT This study was conducted to determine whether acoustic analysis of emotional prosody can assist in differential diagnosis of cognitive impairment. Speech samples describing the Cookie Theft picture were obtained from the Dementia Talkbank and analyzed acoustically. Included in this speech dataset were 10 people with dementia of the Alzheimer’s type, 9 people with mild cognitive impairment, 5 people with vascular dementia, and 10 neurotypical controls. The principal component analysis revealed five factors with two to five acoustic measures per factor for differential diagnosis of cognitive impairment.

Introduction: Students and professionals in communication sciences and disorders (CSD) need to exhibit good critical thinking (CT) skills when engaged in clinical tasks. CSD clinicians must make decisions that are free from biases and support their claim with facts. Thus, CSD clinicians need to be trained to question their clinical practices and to skeptically evaluate new practices that develop. A content specific CT test can help determine if students are developing these skills. However, to date, no such content specific critical thinking assessment exists for CSD. The purpose of this study was to determine the reliability of the current version of a specific content critical thinking assessment, the Critical Thinking in Communication Science and Disorders (CTCSD). Methods: A sample of 150 communication sciences and disorders (CSD) graduate students enrolled in three programs participated. They completed an online Qualtrics survey that consisted of the CTCSD. They completed the Qualtrics survey twice, once at the beginning of a semester and once at the end. The participant responses were independently scored by two research associates. The data were analyzed for reliability in three ways. Intra-subject reliability was assessed by comparing scores across the two testing sessions. Internal consistency of the items to measure a common construct was assessed using Cronbach's alpha and the Guttman's Lambda 6. Inter-rater reliability was assessed using Cohen's Kappa coefficient. In addition, the time used to complete the survey was analyzed. Results: The students from the three programs scored similarly on the CTCSD. High reliability ratings occurred for the intra-subject, internal consistency, and inter-rater measures. Discussion/conclusion: The results indicate the reliability of the CTCSD. In combination with previous results indicating the face, construct, and criterion validity of the CTCSD, it appears to have psychometric strength. The CTCSD may help academic and clinical faculty select learning activities and focus feedback to their graduate students in order to reinforce skills the students exhibit and to develop other skills.