A Sampling of Our Research

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

Associate Professor Nancy E. Hall conducts research on the relationship between language and fluency in children and adults. She has explored the hypothesis that disfluencies in speech output may reflect underlying processes of language production in typically developing children, those with communication disorders, such as language impairment or stuttering, and in older adults. Dr. Hall discussed some of this work in her invited article "Lexical development and retrieval in treating children who stutter" in the January, 2004 issue of Language, Speech, Hearing Services in the Schools.

Assistant Professor Susan Lambrecht Smith's research interests center around the role of phonology children who have expressive language disorders and dyslexia. Currently, Dr. Lambrecht Smith is involved in a project exploring phonological patterns in the emergent lexicons of children who later have been diagnosed with dyslexia. She is a member of a team of researchers in the eastern United States who are seeking "precursors" of reading disorders which could someday allow early identification of dyslexia well before children reach school age.

Assistant Professor Allan B. Smith is interested in the acoustic measurement of speech in children, particularly children with delayed speech development. 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, and "The influence of utterance position on children's production of lexical stress" in the April, 2006 issue of Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica. Currently he is investigating the timing characteristics of early speech in children at high genetic risk for language and reading disorders (e.g., Smith et al., (2006). Reduced speaking rate as an early indicator of reading disability, American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology).

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 right hemisphere damage," can be found in Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 18(2).

Recent CSD Theses:

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.