UMaine Students Co-Author Papers for at the 2006 American Speech-Language-Hearing Convention in Miami Beach, Florida. Above is Graduate Student Laurie Farkas presenting Verbal Response Time in Spontaneous Speech of Toddlers with Dyslexia.

Associate Professor Allan B. Smith is interested in the acoustic measurement of speech in children, particularly children with speech, language, and reading disorders. Examples of his recent work are, “Durational characteristics of the first productions of trochaic and iambic novel words in children with speech delays,” in Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, “Reduced speaking rate as an early indicator of reading disability” in American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, and “A longitudinal study of speech timing in young children later found to have reading disability” in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

Associate Professor Judy P. Walker’s research program explores prosodic deficits in adult subjects with right and left hemisphere damage. Dr. Walker is interested in the abilities of brain-damaged subjects to process and produce prosodic features that influence lexical access, syntactic parsing and the categorical assignment of questions and statements. Her research encompasses response time methodology and acoustic measurements of prosodic features. Her most recent publication, “The production of linguistic prosody by subjects with aphasia,” can be found in the Journal of Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics.

Recent CSD Theses:

• Smith, D. M. (2009). Assessment profiles of auditory processing disorder and language delay: Case studies of four children. Advisor: Dr. Allan B. Smith.
• Thomas, K. (2007). Is there an association between anxiety and stuttering in adults? Advisor: Dr. Nancy E. Hall.
• Higgins, K. (2006). Prevalence of voice disorder in university teaching faculty. Advisor: Dr. Allan B. Smith.
• Sawlivich. L. A. (2004). Phonological neighborhood analysis of young children’s productive vocabularies. Advisor: Dr. Nancy E. Hall.
• Evans, D. L. (2002). The adaptation effect in bilingual people who stutter: An examination of the oral-motor rehearsal theory. Advisor: Dr. Nancy E. Hall.
• Van Putten, S. M. (2001). The production of emotional prosody in varying severities of apraxia of speech. Advisor: Dr. Judy P. Walker.
• Burgess, S. D. (1998). Relationship between language and fluency in preschool children. Advisor. Dr. Nancy E. Hall.