Barrett

Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.

Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.

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Does Auditory Feedback Perturbation Influence Categorical Perception of Vowels?

Description
Speech perception and production are bidirectionally related, and they influence each other. The purpose of this study was to better understand the relationship between speech perception and speech production. It is known that applying auditory perturbations during speech production causes subjects to alter their productions (e.g., change their formant frequencies).…

Speech perception and production are bidirectionally related, and they influence each other. The purpose of this study was to better understand the relationship between speech perception and speech production. It is known that applying auditory perturbations during speech production causes subjects to alter their productions (e.g., change their formant frequencies). In other words, previous studies have examined the effects of altered speech perception on speech production. However, in this study, we examined potential effects of speech production on speech perception. Subjects completed a block of a categorical perception task followed by a block of a speaking or a listening task followed by another block of the categorical perception task. Subjects completed three blocks of the speaking task and three blocks of the listening task. In the three blocks of a given task (speaking or listening) auditory feedback was 1) normal, 2) altered to be less variable, or 3) altered to be more variable. Unlike previous studies, we used subject’s own speech samples to generate speech stimuli for the perception task. For each categorical perception block, we calculated subject’s psychometric function and determined subject’s categorical boundary. The results showed that subjects’ perceptual boundary remained stable in all conditions and all blocks. Overall, our results did not provide evidence for the effects of speech production on speech perception.
ContributorsDaugherty, Allison (Author) / Daliri, Ayoub (Thesis director) / Rogalsky, Corianne (Committee member) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05

Pact: A Virtual Reality Rehabilitation Game for Individuals with Aphasia

Description

Aphasia is an impairment that affects many different aspects of language and makes it more difficult for a person to communicate with those around them. Treatment for aphasia is often administered by a speech-language pathologist in a clinical setting, but researchers have recently begun exploring the potential of virtual reality…

Aphasia is an impairment that affects many different aspects of language and makes it more difficult for a person to communicate with those around them. Treatment for aphasia is often administered by a speech-language pathologist in a clinical setting, but researchers have recently begun exploring the potential of virtual reality (VR) interventions. VR provides an immersive environment and can allow multiple users to interact with digitized content. This exploratory paper proposes the design of a VR rehabilitation game –called Pact– for adults with aphasia that aims to improve the word-finding and picture-naming abilities of users to improve communication skills. Additionally, a study is proposed that will assess how well Pact improves the word-finding and picture-naming abilities of users when it is used in conjunction with speech therapy. If the results of the study show an increase in word-finding and picture-naming scores compared to the control group (patients receiving traditional speech therapy alone), the results would indicate that Pact can achieve its goal of promoting improvement in these domains. There is a further need to examine VR interventions for aphasia, particularly with larger sample sizes that explore the gains associated with or design issues associated with multi-user VR programs.
ContributorsGringorten, Rachel (Author) / Johnson, Mina (Thesis director) / Rogalsky, Corianne (Committee member) / English, Stephen (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / School of Music, Dance and Theatre (Contributor)
Created2023-05
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Speech Motor Learning Depends on Relevant Auditory Errors

Description
In the past, researchers have studied the elements of speech and how they work together in the human brain. Auditory feedback, an important aid in speech production, provides information to speakers and allows them to gain an understanding if the prediction of their speech matches their production. The speech motor…

In the past, researchers have studied the elements of speech and how they work together in the human brain. Auditory feedback, an important aid in speech production, provides information to speakers and allows them to gain an understanding if the prediction of their speech matches their production. The speech motor system uses auditory goals to determine errors in its auditory output during vowel production. We learn from discrepancies between our prediction and auditory feedback. In this study, we examined error assessment processes by systematically manipulating the correspondence between speech motor outputs and their auditory consequences while producing speech. We conducted a study (n = 14 adults) in which participants’ auditory feedback was perturbed to test their learning rate in two conditions. During the trials, participants repeated CVC words and were instructed to prolong the vowel each time. The adaptation trials were used to examine the reliance of auditory feedback and speech prediction by systematically changing the weight of auditory feedback. Participants heard their perturbed feedback through insert earphones in real time. Each speaker’s auditory feedback was perturbed according to task-relevant and task-irrelevant errors. Then, these perturbations were presented to subjects gradually and suddenly in the study. We found that adaptation was less extensive with task-irrelevant errors, adaptation did not saturate significantly in the sudden condition, and adaptation, which was expected to be extensive and faster in the task-relevant condition, was closer to the rate of adaptation in the task-irrelevant perturbation. Though adjustments are necessary, we found an efficient way for speakers to rely on auditory feedback more than their prediction. Furthermore, this research opens the door to future investigations in adaptation in speech and presents implications for clinical purposes (e.g. speech therapy).
ContributorsLukowiak, Ariana (Author) / Daliri, Ayoub (Thesis director) / Rogalsky, Corianne (Committee member) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor, Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05