The Developmental Stuttering Project
Ryan Spears and Michael Kremer
Background:
Our team selected a project dealing with stuttering under the advisement of Dr. Tedra Walden of the Vanderbilt Departments of Psychology and Hearing and Speech Sciences and the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center. In this project, we aim (1) to develop a quantitative means of distinguishing between the patterns of stuttering and non-stuttering speech, and (2) to build a research tool to assess children’s bias against stuttering.
As of the last progress report, we had progressed into development of the implicit association task and begun to identify avenues of expanding the project.
Progress:
In the past week, our team has advanced the project on a number of different fronts. Regarding the Implicit Association Task itself, we finalized the code for the basic logic behind the test. We also continued to research the packages needed to play sound in Java Eclipse and a mechanism for adding dynamic features to the Eclipse Windowbuilder graphic user interface.
On the administrative side, we completed and submitted our REDCap information with the working title of Stuttering Implicit Association Task and a working project description with the expectation of changing the title in the future and augmenting the project description as the project develops. In addition, we met with Dr. Walden on November 12th to discuss progression of the project and the potential for project expansion. Foremost, we established a deadline for completion of the Implicit Association Task of the first week of Spring semester, the week of Monday, January 11th. In discussing the potential for developing a means of distinguishing stuttered speech from non-stuttered speech, we learned of existing methods for objective characterization of stuttering. We also collectively identified previously unaddressed project needs associated with having the implicit task association fully operational by the end of the Spring semester, e.g. testing to ensure a child can follow the prompts as expected, and validating the efficacy of the task itself.
Future:
We will meet with Dr. Walden on Thursday, November 19th to discuss project developments, and we are hoping to meet with Dr. Walker before then. We will also present our project as it exists thus far on the 19th. For the upcoming week, our primary focus will be condensing the project into a coherent presentation, but we will also address the additional goals of determining proper scope and content of project expansion, rereading scientific papers on the IAT statistical calculations to be integrated into the program, and researching the requirements for sound incorporation in Java Eclipse. To resolve the last of the concerns, it may be necessary to switch to a different integrated development environment such as NetBeans to access the components necessary to run the functions of interest.