Dr. Kaila Stipancic receives American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation Grant

Dr. Kaila Stipancic, a post-doc fellow who will join the CDS faculty team in the Spring semester of 2023, has received a New Investigators Research Grant from American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation (ASH Foundation).

This New Investigators Research Grant is designed to help further new investigators' research activities by funding one-year, preliminary studies that could launch larger-scale research studies.

Dr. Stipancic's research project is to determine the effects of speaker and listener characteristics on the minimally detectable change of speech intelligibility: Dysarthria etiology, speech severity, and listener experience. She will recruit Speech-Language Pathologists and naïve listeners to participate in a perceptual experiment involving judging speech samples of individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Huntington's disease, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson's disease, as well as neurologically healthy controls. The study is important because it will identify factors that affect the measurement and interpretability of speech intelligibility scores across individuals with varying etiologies of dysarthria.