BITS Lab at NYU

Thinking of pursuing a PhD in communicative sciences and disorders? Join me on 10/9/24 (6PM-8PM Eastern) for a virtual info session on our fully funded 5-year program! Attendees will learn about our mission and curriculum and hear tips for a successful application. Breakout sessions will offer a chance to meet our research faculty and current doctoral students. Please register here to obtain the Zoom link: https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/events/communicative-sciences-and-disorders-phd-online-info-session

Exciting news: our team was awarded a $20K planning grant through NYU's Discovery Research Fund for Human Health. Our project "Enhancing Speech Therapy Through Multimodal Artificial Intelligence" aims to develop AI tools that will support more effective intervention for residual speech sound disorder. This project is part of Amanda Eads' dissertation work and includes multidisciplinary contributions from Hai Shu (NYU Global Public Health) and Brian McFee (NYU Music Technology/Data Science). Amanda will be augmenting the PERCEPT corpus of children's /r/ sounds (developed through Nina Benway’s doctoral work at Syracuse University) with ultrasound images to try to infer tongue shapes for correct and incorrect /r/ from the acoustic signal. The goal is to allow clinicians to "see inside the mouth" as if they had ultrasound imaging. In the longer term, we hope these tools can support more effective home practice so kids can improve their speech (and move off the caseload) faster!

ASHA notifications are out and we're excited to share the latest from our lab and collaborators in Seattle this December! Here's what we'll be presenting:

Acoustic Comparison of Rhotic Acquisition in Biofeedback Versus Motor-Based Treatment for Residual Speech Sound Disorder - This is a student poster led by SPARC award recipient Marcela Lara 🏆

Biofeedback Demystified: /ɹ/ Basics for Busy Clinicians - A one-hour seminar that I will be co-presenting with Elaine Hitchcock (Montclair State University) on our work with Jon Preston and colleagues at Syracuse Unviersity!

Improving the Accessibility of Gender-Affirming Voice Training with Visual-Acoustic Biofeedback - This poster will share early findings from BITS Lab's collaboration with Vesna Novak and Tory McKenna from University of Cincinnati; we'd love to hear your feedback 👂

Visual-Acoustic Biofeedback Intervention for /s/ Misarticulation via Telepractice: A Pilot Study - A poster highlighting an exciting new direction led by Michelle Swartz and Elaine Hitchcock's team at Montclair!

New pub alert! Our paper "Word and Gender Identification in the Speech of Transgender Individuals" (Kristina Doyle, Daphna Harel, Graham Feeny, Vesna Novak, & McAllister) was just released in the Journal of Voice. This paper was spearheaded by Kristina, who was the first student to pursue a master's thesis in the context of the time-intensive NYU Steinhardt Speech@NYU online program.

We reanalyzed data from a previous experiment in which trans women matched shifted targets for resonance using visual-acoustic biofeedback. We wanted to know whether listeners would have more difficulty identifying the word produced when speakers were matching a shifted target. We did find evidence that word identification and speaker gender identification are interrelated processes, but we did not observe a significant negative impact of formant shifts on word identification accuracy. This is a positive finding for practitioners who target resonance in the context of gender-affirming voice training (GAVT).

Congratulations to Kristina and watch this space for next steps from our research on biofeedback for resonance in the GAVT context!

BITS Lab students are 🔥 these days! Please join me in a round of applause for NYU CSD students at three levels who just reached thesis-related milestones. Doctoral candidate Amanda Eads successfully proposed her dissertation, which will explore the use of ultrasound tongue shape data to enhance classifiers for children's /ɹ/ sounds 👏 👏 Master's student Barbara Scheer was accepted into the honors program with her proposal to analyze children's responses to altered auditory feedback in a "fast adapt" paradigm 👏 👏 And graduating senior Marcela Lara received approval of her honors thesis comparing acoustic measures of children's gains in /ɹ/ production over the course of treatment with and without biofeedback. 👏 👏 👏 Congratulations to all for these great contributions!

Congratulations to all the new doctors who received their hoods at the NYU Steinhardt PhD hooding ceremony…especially BITS Lab’s own Xi Chen! I learned so much working with Xi, who has a passion for prosody (not an easy thing to study!) in both clinical and second-language learning contexts. Her work on understanding and treating speech symptoms in adults with Parkinson’s who speak a tone language is an important contribution in an understudied area, and we are excited to see where her career leads. Cheers, Dr. Chen!

Know a child/teen who loves STEM in NYC or northern NJ? We are looking for participants aged 9-17 with typical speech and language development for a project investigating sensory and speech skills. It includes a chance to see their tongue during speech using ultrasound imaging! The study offers compensation of $20/hour and can be a great introduction to the scientific research process. We have study sites at NYU and Montclair State University. For more info and our sign-up form, see https://bit.ly/nyuspeechstudy; feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions.

Big props to NYU CSD doctoral student Amanda Eads, whose project "Enhancing Speech Therapy for American English /ɹ/ through Machine Learning Methods" was selected for a 2024 CAPCSD PhD Scholarship! Amanda will be drawing on a corpus of ultrasound tongue images of children's /ɹ/ sounds that she helped collect/process and painstakingly annotated. The long-term goal of her research is to develop tools that can infer tongue shape from the acoustic signal and would allow clinicians to "see inside the mouth" without needing an ultrasound probe! This research builds on work by/with our collaborators at Syracuse University (Nina Benway, Jonathan Preston) and Montclair State University (Elaine Hitchcock), and NYU alum Heather Kabakoff!

Congrats to Marcela Lara, who presented her undergraduate honors thesis project “Acoustic Comparison of Rhotic Acquisition in Biofeedback versus Motor-Based Treatment for Residual Speech Sound Disorder” at the NYU DreamMakers Summit last week! Marcela has made outstanding contributions to BITS lab in her years at NYU, and we are so proud to see all her experiences coming together as she takes the lead on this research project.

Come lend a helping voice for gender diversity! BITS lab is seeking NYC‐area English‐speaking transgender women aged 18‐65 to participate in a research study. Help us explore how computer‐based manipulations can affect how gender is perceived in speakers’ voices. Commitment is one in‐person session roughly one hour in duration. Compensation = $20/hr. The study team will walk you through all procedures! For more info or to submit a screening survey, see https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/speech-gender-diversity-study/home

I’m so excited to share a new direction in my work that falls somewhere between the personal and professional. When my daughter was born in 2019, I decided to dust off my high school French to use with her in the home. (Linguists love a language project!) We ended up pursuing a bilingual school for her, and now French is her preferred language to speak to me, which never ceases to amaze me. Along the way, I learned that many of the ideas I held about raising a bilingual child were flatly wrong, despite my having completed multiple degrees in linguistics and speech pathology. As I continued our family language project, I started working on a book where I delve into the academic literature on bilingualism, with the goal of translating it to parents who may be as clueless as I was.

My first piece on this topic came out today in Slate magazine. I wrote it after reading a Slate article in December 2023 that characterized dual language schools as “the new gifted and talented” - and expressed concern that children from immigrant backgrounds were getting elbowed out of programs that were originally created to serve them. Parents who view dual-language education as a replacement for gifted and talented have generally internalized a message that “bilingualism makes kids smarter.” Many of them are unaware that this claim has been hotly contested in the research literature for over a decade. I am 100% in favor of bilingual education, but as the battle heats up for seats in these programs, I think we may want to tone down the hype about "bilingual kids have bigger brains" and focus on creating classrooms where children from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds can thrive together.

Privileged Parents Strive to Get Their Kids Into Special Kindergartens. There’s Something Big They’re Missing. As a scientist, I wonder how many people know how contested the evidence is.

BITS lab is a research group at NYU investigating speech development and speech therapy. We are looking for English-speaking children and adolescents aged 8-17 in the NYC area for two studies. Children with typical speech and hearing can participate in a study of sensory development (https://bit.ly/nyuspeechstudy), which provides compensation of $20/hour and can be a great introduction to scientific research for kids interested in STEM.

Are you an SLP or business owner who serves school-aged children with SSD? We want to hear from YOU!

For the next six weeks, staRt team member Wendy Liang and I are participating in NSF's I-corps program, which aims to get research out of the lab and into wider use. Our goal is to better understand SLP workflows and challenges, especially as they relate to tech adoption and telepractice. We are especially interested in hearing from practice owners and telepractice contractors.

If you would be willing to have a brief chat with our team (15-30 minutes at a time of your convenience), we would love to connect - comment here and we will follow up on DM!

We would also appreciate any suggestions of people to connect with, including parents, business owners, and content creators in the SLP space!

Big news for the new year! Our team received five more years of NIH R01 funding to investigate the efficacy of visual biofeedback intervention for residual speech sound disorder This time we are expanding our focus to ask whether biofeedback is equally effective when delivered in-person versus via telepractice, and we will investigate whether AI-guided home practice can support the maintenance of treatment gains! I'm thrilled to be continuing to collaborate with an outstanding team at Syracuse University and Montclair State University. More info at NYU's press release here: https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/mcallister-awarded-two-nih-grants-totalling-35m

BITS Lab is so fortunate to work with outstanding undergraduates in CSD at NYU! In two consecutive years, BITS Lab undergraduates have been recognized with the Acoustical Society of America's highly selective Robert W. Young award for excellence in acoustics. Jennifer Yang was a 2022 recipient who just successfully completed her honors undergraduate thesis titled "Investigating perception-production relations in novice learners of Mandarin lexical tone." Marcela Lara was just notified of her selection as a 2023 recipient; the award will support the completion of her honors thesis, "An Acoustic Comparison of Rhotic Acquisition in Biofeedback versus Motor-Based Treatment for Residual Speech Sound Disorder."

Keep an eye on these rising stars!

BITS lab has a new PhD! Please join me in a huge round of applause for Xi Chen, who successfully defended her dissertation today! We are so proud of you, Dr. Chen! 🤩🥳🍾

Here at NYU BITS Lab we are thrilled to have the opportunity to work on a project developing biofeedback software to support resonance training in the context of gender-affirming voice work! 🏳️‍⚧️🗣🏳️‍⚧️Before we dive in, we would like to connect with both SLPs and trans/gender-diverse individuals to better understand how you approach resonance training and what needs you perceive. If you would be open to speaking with our team, please complete a brief Google form (https://forms.gle/yvQvct8nWbFH5HPcA) to tell us a bit about yourself and your availability for an interview. Please note: These interviews are intended to inform our next steps for project planning. This is not a formal survey or focus group study, and the information we obtain will not be shared through external publications or presentations.

Interested in implementation science? The National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) will hold a virtual workshop to explore how to advance dissemination and implementation (D&I) research in the field of communication disorders. More details, including the workshop agenda, are available at https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/news/events/dissemination-implementation-science-communication-disorders-virtual-workshop. All are welcome to watch the workshop on NIH videocast (link at workshop website). No registration is required. The event will be recorded and the recording will be available on the workshop site shortly after the live event.

I am thrilled to share the news about a new direction for the staRt team: adapting visual-acoustic biofeedback to support resonance training in the context of gender-affirming voice work! We are starting out with a project funded by that will support a diverse team of students, researchers, and members of the trans/gender-diverse community at NYU and beyond. This has been in the works for a while and we are so excited to get started! https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/nyu-steinhardt-awards-inaugural-deans-innovation-grants

Have you ever thought about getting a PhD in communicative sciences and disorders? Join our current faculty and students on the evening of 10/4/23 for a virtual info session on our fully funded 5-year program! More information at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Akkx9_VCByN6-vyFyOSW-1d2zGsiLChb/view?usp=sharing

Thrilled to share that BITS Lab PhD alum Heather Kabakoff was awarded NIH F32 funding for her project "Cortical and subcortical underpinnings of typical and dysarthric speech"! In her role a postdoctoral scholar at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, she will be pursuing this project with support from her mentor Adeen Flinker and her co-sponsors Carrie Niziolek and Cara Stepp. Congratulations to Heather - we look forward to hearing more about this exciting research!

Just registered for the ASHFoundation Virtual 5k Walk/Run! I'm embarrassed how long it took me to sign up - but good news, if you're a procrastinator like me, you can still sign up until 8/25/23 and run any time on Saturday 8/26/23. Crispin the mini goldendoodle will not be running with me, but he's happy to cheer us on. https://runsignup.com/Race/MD/Rockville/ASHFoundation5kVirtualWalkRun

Congratulations to Amanda Eads, whose research was selected for a talk at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in Prague! Her work uses computational modeling to try to identify sensory profiles that could guide treatment planning (such as ultrasound versus visual-acoustic biofeedback) for children with Residual Speech Sound Disorder. Collaborators on the paper include Elaine Kearney, Asuka Koda, Isabelle Medina, Elaine Hitchcock, Doug Shiller, and Frank Guenther.

I'm delighted to share that BITS Lab undergraduate Marcela Lara was selected for ASHA's prestigious Students Preparing for Academic-Research Careers (SPARC) award! Marcela has been a valued member of the lab for several years and is currently working on her undergraduate honors thesis describing acoustic measures of children's speech during treatment with and without biofeedback. She joins a proud tradition of BITS lab student recipients of the SPARC award, including Joyce Chung (2022), Samantha Ayala (2018), and Laine Cialdella (2018). We look forward to seeing all of their contributions to research in communication sciences and disorders!

BITS lab social media event happening today!

Please join us for the final day of Rock the R with Dr. Tara McAllister from !

Y’all know how much I love this app. I am blown away that Dr. McAllister agreed to give us her time for Rock the R. I’m so darn appreciative and truly cannot wait to learn more!

The replay will be available tomorrow on my IG feed immediately following the live.

We just launched our instagram page, https://www.instagram.com/bitslabstart/ - please follow us for the latest on the staRt app, biofeedback, and clinical phonetics! A huge thank-you to Marcela Lara and Helen Carey for sharing their social media savvy and amazing design sensibility!

BITS lab is a research group at NYU investigating speech development and speech therapy. We are looking for English-speaking children and adolescents aged 8-17 in the NYC area for two studies. Children with typical speech and hearing can participate in a study of sensory development (https://bit.ly/nyuspeechstudy), which provides compensation of $20/hour and can be a great introduction to scientific research for kids interested in STEM. Children who have trouble saying the "r" sound may be eligible to receive FREE speech therapy as part of our study comparing different treatment methods (https://bit.ly/NYUspeechtherapy). Feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions.

What a great time at the Boston Speech Motor Control Symposium! Congratulations to BITS labbers Amanda Eads for her podium talk, “Auditory Acuity and SimpleDIVA Modeling of Response to Altered Auditory Feedback in Children With and Without Residual Speech Sound Disorder” and to Xi Chen and Joyce Chung for their poster “Predictors of Response to L2 Tone Training With and Without Biofeedback”!

Now recruiting for summer 2023! BITS lab is a research group at NYU investigating speech development and speech therapy. We are looking for English-speaking children and adolescents aged 8-17 in the NYC area for two studies. Children who have trouble saying the "r" sound may be eligible to receive FREE speech therapy as part of our study comparing different treatment methods (https://bit.ly/NYUspeechtherapy). Children with typical speech and hearing can participate in a study of sensory development (https://bit.ly/nyuspeechstudy), which provides compensation of $20/hour and can be a great introduction to scientific research for kids interested in STEM. Feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions.

Today we are celebrating the beginning and the end of two exciting thesis projects in BITS lab! Rising senior Marcela Lara received approval for her proposal titled "An Acoustic Comparison of Rhotic Acquisition in Biofeedback versus Motor-Based Treatment for Residual Speech Sound Disorder," and Joyce Chung's thesis "Do Speakers of a Non-Tone Language Benefit From Real-Time Pitch Biofeedback in Learning Lexical Tones?" was accepted as part of her graduation with honors. Congratulations to both on this important step on your research journey! 🥳