The Great Communicator: Audrey Holland's Legacy and Lessons.

Audrey Holland's core beliefs of respect for people and the quality of their lives informed her life's work. This examination of the ways she managed the academic, research, and clinical parts of her illustrious career shows how Audrey leaves a rich legacy and serves as a model for navigating an impactful career path and enhancing clinical interactions. First, she mentored more than 30 doctoral students who then mentored further generations of students, ran clinics, or shaped policy.

Insights From Important Event Recounts Told by People With Traumatic Brain Injury.

Purpose: Communication can be chronically impacted by severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), yet there is a critical lack of research investigating communication recovery beyond 12 months postinjury with discourse measures. This longitudinal study aimed to investigate quantitative and qualitative changes in recounts produced by a group of people with severe TBI up to 2 years postinjury.

Method: A prospective observational design with an inception cohort was adopted.

The Case of the Cookie Jar: Differences in Typical Language Use in Dementia.

Background: Findings from language sample analyses can provide efficient and effective indicators of cognitive impairment in older adults.

Objective: This study used newly automated core lexicon analyses of Cookie Theft picture descriptions to assess differences in typical use across three groups.

Methods: Participants included adults without diagnosed cognitive impairments (Control), adults diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (ProbableAD), and adults diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

An Overview of the ADReSS-M Signal Processing Grand Challenge on Multilingual Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition Through Spontaneous Speech.

The ADReSS-M Signal Processing Grand Challenge was held at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2023. The challenge targeted difficult automatic prediction problems of great societal and medical relevance, namely, the detection of Alzheimer's Dementia (AD) and the estimation of cognitive test scoress. Participants were invited to create models for the assessment of cognitive function based on spontaneous speech data.

Automated Analysis of Fluency Behaviors in Aphasia.

Purpose: This study explored the use of an automated language analysis tool, FLUCALC, for measuring fluency in aphasia. The purpose was to determine whether CLAN's FLUCALC command could produce efficient, objective outcome measures for salient aspects of fluency in aphasia.

Method: The FLUCALC command was used on CHAT transcripts of Cinderella stories from people with aphasia (PWA; = 281) and controls ( = 257) in the AphasiaBank database.

Comparing apples to manzanas and oranges to naranjas: A new measure of English-Spanish vocabulary for dual language learners.

The valid assessment of vocabulary development in dual-language-learning infants is critical to developmental science. We developed the Dual Language Learners English-Spanish (DLL-ES) Inventories to measure vocabularies of U.S.

Expanding the emergentist Account:Reply to open peer commentaries.

Emergentism provides a framework for understanding how language learning processes vary across developmental age and linguistic levels, as shaped by core mechanisms and constraints from cognition, entrenchment, input, transfer, social support, motivation, and neurology. As our commentators all agree, this landscape is marked by intense variability arising from the complexity. These mechanisms interact in collaborative and competitive ways during actual moments of language use.

The Development and Implementation of A Data Repository for Swallow Studies.

Purpose: The purpose of this clinical note is to (a) describe the development of an open-source data repository of videofluoroscopic evaluations of swallow studies (VFSS) from individuals across the lifespan with various feeding and swallowing disorders, and (b) to qualitatively assess the usefulness of a repository to engage students in research in swallowing disorders.

Method: This project was divided into two phases. Phase 1 focused on the development of the repository.

Collaborative Commentary for Understanding Communication Disorders.

Purpose: The goal of the Collaborative Commentary (CC) system is to make the TalkBank adult clinical databases-including AphasiaBank, DementiaBank, RHDBank, and TBIBank-open to commentary and analysis from the full community of researchers, instructors, students, and clinicians.

Method: CC allows a group leader to establish a commentary group and invite colleagues or students to join as members of the group. Members can then browse through the transcript database using the TalkBank Browser.

Automation of Language Sample Analysis.

Purpose: A major barrier to the wider use of language sample analysis (LSA) is the fact that transcription is very time intensive. Methods that can reduce the required time and effort could help in promoting the use of LSA for clinical practice and research.

Method: This article describes an automated pipeline, called Batchalign, that takes raw audio and creates full transcripts in Codes for the Human Analysis of Talk (CHAT) transcription format, complete with utterance- and word-level time alignments and morphosyntactic analysis.

Assessment and Therapy Goal Planning Using Free Computerized Language Analysis Software.

Background: We discuss a free software system (Computerized Language Analysis [CLAN]) that can enable fast, thorough, and informative language sample analysis (LSA).

Method: We describe methods for eliciting, transcribing, analyzing, and interpreting language samples. Using a hypothetical child speaker, we illustrate use KidEval to generate a diagnostic report.

Age effects in second language acquisition: Expanding the emergentist account.

In 2005, Science magazine designated the problem of accounting for difficulties in L2 (second language) learning as one of the 125 outstanding challenges facing scientific research. A maturationally-based sensitive period has long been the favorite explanation for why ultimate foreign language attainment declines with age-of-acquisition. However, no genetic or neurobiological mechanisms for limiting language learning have yet been identified.

Communication and Psychosocial Outcomes 2-Years After Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: Development of a Prognostic Model.

Objective: To examine predictive factors underlying communication and psychosocial outcomes at 2 years post-injury. Prognosis of communication and psychosocial outcomes after severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) is largely unknown yet is relevant for clinical service provision, resource allocation, and managing patient and family expectations for recovery.

Design: A prospective longitudinal inception design was employed with assessments at 3 months, 6 months, and 2 years.

DementiaBank: Theoretical Rationale, Protocol, and Illustrative Analyses.

Purpose: Dementia from Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized primarily by a significant decline in memory abilities; however, language abilities are also commonly affected and may precede the decline of other cognitive abilities. To study the progression of language, there is a need for open-access databases that can be used to build algorithms to produce translational models sensitive enough to detect early declines in language abilities. DementiaBank is an open-access repository of transcribed video/audio data from communicative interactions from people with dementia, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and controls.

TBIBank: An International Shared Database to Enhance Research, Teaching and Automated Language Analysis for Traumatic Brain Injury Populations.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been established as a priority research area for public health, affecting an estimated 69 million individuals worldwide each year. Large-scale collaborative datasets may help to better understand this heterogenous and chronic health condition. In this paper, we present TBIBank; an innovative digital health resource that aims to establish a shared database for the study of communication disorders after TBI.

Enhancing the Classification of Aphasia: A Statistical Analysis Using Connected Speech.

Background: Large shared databases and automated language analyses allow for the application of new data analysis techniques that can shed new light on the connected speech of people with aphasia (PWA).

Aims: To identify coherent clusters of PWA based on language output using unsupervised statistical algorithms and to identify features that are most strongly associated with those clusters.

Methods & Procedures: Clustering and classification methods were applied to language production data from 168 PWA.

Validation of an Automated Procedure for Calculating Core Lexicon From Transcripts.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to advance the use of structured, monologic discourse analysis by validating an automated scoring procedure for core lexicon (CoreLex) using transcripts.

Method: Forty-nine transcripts from persons with aphasia and 48 transcripts from persons with no brain injury were retrieved from the AphasiaBank database. Five structured monologic discourse tasks were scored manually by trained scorers and via automation using a newly developed CLAN command based upon previously published lists for CoreLex.

Gesture-Speech Integration in Typical and Atypical Adolescent Readers.

This study investigated gesture-speech integration (GSI) among adolescents who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) and those with typical hearing. Thirty-eight adolescents (19 with hearing loss) performed a Stroop-like task in which they watched 120 short video clips of gestures and actions twice at random. Participants were asked to press one button if the visual content of the speaker's movements was related to a written word and to press another button if it was unrelated to a written word while accuracy rates and response times were recorded.

Attentional Competition and Semantic Integration in Low- and High-Span Readers.

The goal of the current study is to investigate the effects of the distractive textual information on the activation of predictive inference online, and how the readers with high or low working memory capacity (WMC) differ in their online activation and text memory. To test the two hypothesis of attentional competition (AC) and semantic integration (SI), we conducted three experiments to investigate whether a local prediction (e.g.

Dynamic Norming and Open Science.

In a recent issue of Tucci et al. (2022) presented a method for assigning scores to a language sample. However, this method is based on data that are not publicly available and uses a commercial analysis program that is not open source.

The Effects of Right Hemisphere Brain Damage on Question-Asking in Conversation.

Background: Right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) can cause challenges with information gathering. Cognitive processes aid in implicit and explicit information gathering, yet the relationship between these processes and question-asking, the most explicit avenue of information gathering, has not been explored. The purpose of this exploratory descriptive study was to test the hypothesis that adults with RHD differ from controls in the types of questions produced during a conversational discourse task and whether observed differences are associated with cognitive limitations.