Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
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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- Creators: College of Health Solutions
Description
This study was originally designed to assess the relationship between central executive function and the symptoms of ADHD. To quantify this relationship, the performance of two second graders with typical development (TD) who were also diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) were to be compared to peers with TD but no ADHD. Due to recruitment difficulties, only two participants with ADHD were enrolled. Participants completed four executive function tasks from the Comprehensive Assessment Battery for Children-Working Memory (CABC-WM; Alt, Brinkley, Cabbage, Cowan, Gray, Green, Hogan & Kuo, 2017) including repetition detection auditory and visual and number updating auditory and visual. No concrete results could be made for this study due to only having two participants, however, there are many considerations that can be made due to the completion of this study. The discussion considers how children with ADHD may struggle in school and at home. This study was unable to reach the number of desired participants (5), however, a discussion can be had about the importance of the study and what was learned regarding the research study from this study as well.
ContributorsMcgrath, Celia (Author, Co-author) / Gray, Shelley (Thesis director) / Weinhold, Juliet (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor)
Created2022-05
Description
Classic Galactosemia (CG) is a rare recessive metabolic disease resulting in the inability to digest galactose. Despite early detection via newborn screening and strict diet management, infants with CG are at high risk for severe speech (60%) and language (90%) disorders (Waggoner, D., Buist, N., & Donnell, 1990). Although this risk is known since birth, no preventive treatment approaches in the area of speech and language have been developed. The Babble Boot Camp (BBC) is the first experimental proactive intervention for infants with CG ages 2 to 24 months. It is designed to stimulate early vocalization, coo, babble, first words, vocabulary growth, and syntactic complexity, with the goal of preventing or at least ameliorating the expected speech and language difficulties. All children undergo close monitoring. Day-long audio recordings, collected once per month using the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system, are the source material for pre-speech and speech measures including Mean Babbling Level (MBL), Syllable Structure Level (SSL), and phonetic and phonemic inventory complexity.
Parent questionnaires are analyzed for expressive vocabulary size. Here, findings are described for the first 9 children who underwent the BBC and an untreated control child, all with CG. The initial results are consistent with higher MBL and SSL scores in the treatment cohort, compared to the untreated control infant. In addition, most children in the treatment cohort achieved larger vocabulary sizes than the control child. Of the four oldest children in the treatment cohort, three had expressive vocabularies within normal limits at 21 months. Phonetic
inventory complexity at 11 months predicted expressive vocabulary at 18 months. Given the high risk for speech and language disorders in children with CG, these results are encouraging, but an appropriately powered clinical trial is necessary to validate these findings. The BBC is on its way to a full clinical trial with 75 families, fully funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Parent questionnaires are analyzed for expressive vocabulary size. Here, findings are described for the first 9 children who underwent the BBC and an untreated control child, all with CG. The initial results are consistent with higher MBL and SSL scores in the treatment cohort, compared to the untreated control infant. In addition, most children in the treatment cohort achieved larger vocabulary sizes than the control child. Of the four oldest children in the treatment cohort, three had expressive vocabularies within normal limits at 21 months. Phonetic
inventory complexity at 11 months predicted expressive vocabulary at 18 months. Given the high risk for speech and language disorders in children with CG, these results are encouraging, but an appropriately powered clinical trial is necessary to validate these findings. The BBC is on its way to a full clinical trial with 75 families, fully funded by the National Institutes of Health.
ContributorsDonenfeld-Peled, Inbal (Author) / Peter, Beate (Thesis director) / Weinhold, Juliet (Committee member) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Research regarding typical English language development in children who are bilingual is of interest for speech-language pathologists, but often this information is not available to them. As a result, many individuals find themselves believing false stereotypes about children who are bilingual, such as the idea that bilingualism causes developmental delay or disorders. For example, individuals do not realize the differences in past tense development for bilingual children versus monolingual children, a form that is often difficult for monolingual English-speaking children with developmental language delays. By focusing on a specific aspect of language development, such as English past tense acquisition of children who are bilingual, and observing changes in MLU and grammaticality that accompany acquisition, this study seeks to increase the existing knowledge on bilingualism and language development. Specifically, we will answer the following questions: a) At which grade level do Spanish-English bilingual children master English past tense after they enter English-only schooling in preschool? b) What types of errors do the children make with regular past tense? c) what types of errors do they make with irregular past tense? and d) What is the level of English grammaticality and MLUw at each grade level in English after children enter preschool? This study examined past-tense accuracy, MLU, and grammaticality development over a period of 5 years, in 13 children who were participants in a larger project called the Language and Reading Research Consortium (LARRC). Children were followed from preschool to third grade. They provided a yearly language sample by retelling one of the wordless Marianna Meyer and Mercer Meyer frog books, such as Frog on His Own or A Boy a Dog a Frog and a Friend. The language samples were then transcribed, coded, and analyzed using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) software. Results indicate that children progressively improved over the years, with children reaching over 80% accuracy with past tense by year 3 or first grade; they demonstrated the most improvement in MLU between years 2 to 3 and years 3 to 4; and they showed a gradual improvement in grammaticality each year, with the exception of no increase between years 4 to 5. Findings from the study indicate that there is leveling in all three areas after 2nd grade. These results contribute to our understanding of normal English language development in bilingual children and may improve assessment when we evaluate their performance in English as a second language.
ContributorsEdem, Stephanie (Author) / Restrepo, M. Adelaida (Thesis director) / Weinhold, Juliet (Committee member) / Pierce, Melissa (Committee member) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor, Contributor) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12