Hearing & Speech Sciences Undergraduate Honors Theses

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/29522

The objective of the HESP Honors Program is to encourage and recognize superior academic achievement and scholarship by providing opportunities for interested, capable, and energetic undergraduates to engage in independent study. A research project will be conducted under the supervision of a faculty mentor and will result in an Honors thesis.

The goals of the HESP Honors program are as follows:

  • Educate students to think independently on a broad range of ideas and issues related to the study of Hearing and Speech Sciences.
  • Provide opportunities for in-depth, scholarly, and scientific analysis of significant and current topics in the Hearing and Speech Sciences.
  • Provide students with the experience of undertaking a research project.

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    Temporal Processing in Adults Who Stutter
    (2024-05-10) Wathen, Jasmine; Anderson, Samira; Ratner, Nan Bernstein
    Stuttering is often thought of as simply an impairment in speech production. However, some studies have indicated that people who stutter (PWS) also experience temporal processing impairments which affect perception of speech. In particular, previous behavioral and electrophysiology (EEG) studies have demonstrated time delays in processing speech stimuli in PWS. Most research to this date has only examined these timing delays at the level of the cerebral cortex, which represents the later stages of processing. Very few studies have examined delays at the level of the brainstem, and no study has looked at processing in both the cortex and the brainstem. This study recruited adults who stutter (AWS) and adults who do not stutter (AWNS) to examine how each group processes speech at both subcortical and cortical levels. Participants completed a perceptual test to determine how well they perceived speech and underwent EEG testing to measure cortical and subcortical electrical activity while listening to speech stimuli. Compared to AWNS, AWS showed poorer neural representations of the speech stimulus in the brainstem and delays at the cortical level. Perceptual testing in AWS also seemed to show a poorer perception of phoneme boundaries in words compared to AWNS. Our research suggests that temporal processing deficits are a factor in stuttering and that these deficits arise at early levels of the auditory system. These findings might call for an update of current speech therapy methods to address the timing delays that AWS experience in speech processing.