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 our last progress report, we were developing a prototype for our implicit association test, with a deadline of January 11th for delivering a functional prototype.
Progress:
Before winter break, we revised our deadline for delivering a functional prototype to January 31st.
Over winter break, we focused our efforts on building the implicit association test. Early on, we made a major pivot in the core structure of the program, shifting from the Windowbuilder tool to Applet design combined with Swing user interface components. Since doing so, we have established dynamic function of the user interface and completed and incorporated test logic for cycling through and between individual trials. We have not found a way to simulate image and audio incorporation outside the webpage environment, but we are bypassing the issue by proceeding directly to webpage integration. In addition, in switching away from Windowbuilder, we have lost the aesthetic framework for the test, but we plan to handle the way the test looks once we have the mechanics of the test functionalized.
In the past week, we gave our first presentation and had our first meeting with Dr. Walden, both Wednesday, January 25th. Following the presentation, we received a number of suggestions for augmenting our presentation from Dr. Walker. In our meeting with Dr. Walden, we updated each other on our progress since our last meeting at the end of Fall semester. Over break, she completed recording of all desired audio clips with the project’s audio engineer, but it appears that production of the audio clips will take longer than initially anticipated. From there, we discussed status of the project and course of action moving forward.
Future:
We will present again next week on Wednesday, February 3rd, and will meet with Dr. Walden again the same day. Our priority for the upcoming week is establishing webpage integration of the implicit association test, which we will display in these preliminary stages on this site. In addition, we will incorporate Dr. Walker’s suggestions into our presentation.