2007
Awarded $10,000 each
Jessica A. Barlow
San Diego State University
"Typological Variation in Phonetic Inventory Development"
Melissa C. Duff
University of Iowa
"Effect of an Impaired Somatic Marker System on the Use of Involvement Strategies in
Communication Following Bilateral Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Damage"
Liat Seiger-Gerdner
Lehman College, The City University of New York
"The Effects of Phonologically Related Distractors on Phonological Processing in Preschool
Children"
Mahalakshmi Sivasankar
Purdue University
"Characterizing Vocal Fold Collagen with Atomic Force Microscopy: Implications for
Bioimplants and Bioengineered Vocal Folds"
2006
Awarded $10,000 each
Cathy Binger
University of New Mexico
"The Effects of a Grammar Intervention Program for Children who Require AAC"
Jill E. Preminger
University of Louisville Research Foundation, Inc.
"Development and Evaluation of Audiologic Rehabilitation Programming for Significant
Others of Individuals with Hearing Loss"
Geralyn R. Timler
University of Buffalo
"Clinical Markers of Language Impairment (LI) in Young Children with ADHD"
Nathan V. Wellham
University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health
"Proteomic Mapping of the Vocal Fold Extracellular Matrix"
Krista M. Wilkinson
Emerson College
"Interdisciplinary Exploration of Visual-Perceptual Processes in the Design of Aided AAC Symbol Displays"
2005
Awarded $10,000 each
Angela Hein Ciccia
Case Western Reserve University
"Behavioral and Neural Network Analysis of Social Information Processing in Older Adolescents Following Severe Traumatic Brain Injury"
Tracy S. Fitzgerald
University of Maryland, College Park
"DPOAE Mechanisms and the Estimation of Hearing Loss"
Katherine C. Hustad
University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Improving Intelligibility in Speakers with Moderate and Severe Dysarthria through Fundamental Frequency Manipulations"
Gloria Soto
San Francisco State University
"The Effect of Narrative Intervention on the Stories Told by Children Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems"
2004
Awarded $10,000 each
Bharti Katbamna
Western Michigan University
"Assessing the Role of Connexin 43 Gene in Hearing via RNA Interference"
Karla K. McGregor
Northwestern University
"Individual Differences in Children's Use of Social Cues to Aid Word Comprehension"
2003
Awarded $10,000
Swathi Kiran
University of Texas at Austin
"Effect of Semantic Complexity on Treatment of Lexical Access Deficits in Aphasia"
Dr. Kiran is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. To further her research in language processing and language recovery in individuals with and without brain damage, Dr. Kiran plans to confirm and extend the findings of her doctoral dissertation that training more com plex atypical examples of a category resulted in generalization to untrained but simpler typical examples, but not vice versa.
These findings have far-reaching implications on the best methods of practice in facilitating lexical access in individuals with aphasia, since current clinical aphasiology typically trains simple items before proceeding to more complex items. The project extends these hypotheses to other semantic categories and also examines lexical retrieval in a variety of contexts, such as confrontation naming and category fluency.
One long-term objective is to develop an efficacious treatment program that can serve as a basis for future neuroimaging studies investigating treatment-induced changes in neural activation.
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