April 25, 2025 | Pamela Hadley, Charles and Kay Stenberg Professor and SHS Department Head
Pamela Hadley
Dear Students, Faculty, Alumni and Friends of the Department of Speech and Hearing Science,
As we step into the energy of spring 2025, I’m excited to share the latest updates from our department. It’s been a remarkable year, and we have so much to celebrate!
Our commitment to advancing the field of communication sciences and disorders continues to grow. In this edition, we highlight the inspiring achievements of our faculty, students and alumni. We have stories on a newly established aphasia group, multiple grants on understanding and improving hearing in noise, how our research translates to the lives of friends and family and an introduction to one of our new faculty members.
Take a moment to explore the stories in this newsletter and reflect on the incredible work in SHS. Together, we’re pushing boundaries, advancing new approaches to treatment, and improving lives of children and adults.
A heartfelt thank you to our dedicated faculty, staff and students—your passion and perseverance are the heart of our success.
Wishing you a vibrant and inspiring spring season!
Sincerely, Pamela Hadley, Ph.D. Charles and Kay Stenberg Professor and Head
A new weekly aphasia communication group is helping Illinois speech-language pathologists understand the condition
The weekly aphasia communication group is the ‘best hour’ of everyone’s week, one member said. (Photo by Ethan Simmons)
In the days following her stroke, all Mary Moore could remember was two phrases: her name, and Dec. 26, the day she was born.
A short five months later, Moore was in the Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology Clinic, leading a lively conversation with students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She’s now a regular attendee of the Aphasia Weekly Communication Group, a brand new initiative in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Illinois.
“It’s very accommodating to people, and it’s just so, so much fun,” Moore said. “It helps your ability to socialize and get out there when you go back home afterwards.”
Now that Moore is living with aphasia, a language disorder that limits the comprehension and production of speech, she knows her conversational skills may never return to her pre-stroke fluency. But the camaraderie she experiences each week with the group provides a regular boost to her confidence.
The aphasia communication group brings master’s degree students studying to become speech-language pathologists together with adults with aphasia for hour-long chats.
The table topics at the clinic range from basic icebreakers (“Who’s your favorite celebrity? What’s a fun fact no one knows about you?”) to short word games and trivia contests. Each session challenges the participants on their recall of people, places and things, while the students gather valuable insights about how aphasia is experienced in the real world.
All the students are enrolled in a class, SHS 534 Aphasia and Related Disorders, taught by Teaching Assistant Professor Anna Pucilowksi. Department faculty have been hoping to add a real-life dimension to the class for years, and now, they finally have it.
Abby Franz, a longtime SLP and instructor at the Illinois clinic, has facilitated the weekly aphasia group since it kicked off in January.
“Our goal was to make sure the students understood this was an opportunity for the individuals who have aphasia to enhance their communication in a more informal social conversation because individuals who have aphasia often become isolated. They don’t get the same social experience just because of their language impairment,” Franz said.
“This is an opportunity for them to come together, socialize and interact with other individuals who have aphasia, which they really appreciate—I’m finding that to be very important to this group.”
A New Opportunity
According to the National Aphasia Association, at least 2 million people in the U.S. live with aphasia. The most common cause is from strokes: nearly one-third of the strokes that occur each year in this country, or roughly 225,000, result in aphasia.
For such a prevalent language disorder, SHS faculty felt their students needed more exposure to understand aphasia more fully.
“It was really obvious that our master’s students were not having real-life experience talking to people with aphasia,” Pucilowski said. “For previous cohorts of students, the course material just seemed really theoretical. I can show them videos, but they’re not actually learning what it’s like.”
Though this aphasia communication group is completely new for the Department of SHS at Illinois, similar conversation groups are common at hospitals and recovery centers across the country, Franz said. An aphasia communication group existed at Carle Hospital in Urbana, but it petered out prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
At SHS, the need for more in-person interaction began bubbling further when the department yielded a larger-than-usual cohort of students. Then, the Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology Clinic became certified to accept Medicare clients last spring, bringing in more older adults to the clinic.
Pucilowski and Franz put together a proposal for the aphasia group in fall 2024, and the plan was quickly accepted. All that was left was to find participants.
To get the word out, they relied on word-of-mouth and some boots-on-the-ground flyer marketing, mainly in nearby health care facilities. In the first semester, around five regular participants have continued to show and chat with Franz and the students.
Aphasia manifests in a broad spectrum. On the severest end, clients with aphasia may struggle to communicate a single word or sound, or their comprehension could be significantly impaired. On the milder side, individuals with aphasia may speak quite fluently, Franz said, even if they misuse or mispronounce certain words, or halt as they try to recall the correct phrase.
This is an opportunity for them to come together, socialize and interact with other individuals who have aphasia, which they really appreciate—I’m finding that to be very important to this group.
Abby Franz
SLP and instructor at the Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology Clinic
In the current aphasia communication group, participants are all on the milder end of the spectrum. More importantly, they’ve gotten along swimmingly.
“The group’s really pretty fluent. The dynamic’s great,” Franz said. “They all are very unique and have a lot in common and are very interesting individuals. And that was just purely by luck.”
The ‘Best Hour’ of the Week
At their Wednesday session before spring break, students and participants in the aphasia communication group were asked to describe their experience with the group in one word.
Student Michaela Herwig chose the word “blessing.”
“It’s been really cool learning about them as people,” said Herwig, who’s training to become a clinical SLP. “Because before they had their strokes and before they had aphasia, they’ve lived very cool lives and they still do really cool things now, even though they might have to adapt them in different ways.”
As the weeks went on, new fascinating biography details kept leaking out from the participants. Many of the participants happen to be world travelers, for example, having spent years living overseas or learning different languages.
Within Herwig’s class of future speech-language pathologists, word about the aphasia group is starting to spread.
“We all describe this group as the best hour of our week,” she said. “Being in this group has solidified that this is a population I really want to work with when I graduate.”
For the students, each hour in the group is an opportunity to improve their clinical writing skills when working with individuals with aphasia and practice the right communication approach with these clients. In the first phase of the aphasia class, students complete a supported communication training where they learn strategies of how best to interact with patients with aphasia.
When a speaker with aphasia is working to get their point across, subtle nods and nonverbal cues in response go a long way. Sometimes, the students will rephrase a question to make sure everyone’s on the same page or ask the participant to write down the sentence they’re caught on.
“People who have a language disorder, they have full lives and they’re doing their best to recover and get through life,” said Tony Jacobs, a first-year SLP student who was placed in the group. “To see people with aphasia holistically and not just learning about it in class is one of the best parts of this group.”
In the second part of the aphasia class, students design their own eight-week aphasia intervention program—anything from a book club, to a volunteer group, exercise club or another socially driven way to engage participants. The aphasia communication group provides a hands-on learning experience of what these programs can look like.
“The way aphasia is getting treated nowadays, it’s with what’s called the ‘life participation’ approach to aphasia,” Pucilowksi said. “You don’t just come to a clinic and do some exercises and expect your language to change. You have to situate it in context, and language happens in groups and communities.”
The Road Ahead
What does recovery look like for a person with aphasia? With the most common cause being a stroke, the severity of the stroke and age of the patient are the main variables. Most patients can expect their fastest language recoveries in the first 3 to 6 months. A year out, progress typically levels off.
The class, instructors and participants want to keep this aphasia communication group going. (Photo by Ethan Simmons)
Communication groups target the isolation that comes with aphasia, improving the participants’ social health as much as their physical health.
“If we can improve their life, even if it’s just one of them, if they’re feeling more comfortable socially and we’re enhancing their life, then the goal is met, right?” Franz said.
With the first semester wrapping up smoothly, the class, instructors and participants want to keep this aphasia communication group going. There are undoubtedly more people in the Champaign-Urbana area with aphasia, and more students in the department eager to learn from the experience.
“If we can start offering these eight-week programs and groups, and more niche specialty groups, I think that would be great for the students and great fun for the participants,” Pucilowski said. “That would be my dream.”
From the time she walks into the sessions on Wednesday mornings, Mary Moore can hardly wipe the grin off her face. It’s hard to believe now, but months ago she was on the fence about joining the aphasia group at all. After understanding her diagnosis, she became determined to “do her homework.”
“I just had to get better. I had to get better,” Moore said. “I just decided I wanted to go, no matter whether it was in winter or whatever, that I wanted to go. So I did.”
Moore feels a weight lifted when she’s back in the room with Franz and the students. Gone are any airs of judgment when she stammers searching for the correct word, only patience and understanding.
Her advice to any adults with aphasia thinking about joining: “Go for it.”
“The students are wonderful, and they are very kind. They don’t talk about you, they listen to you and they care about you,” Moore said. “It’s just so good, it’s beyond belief.”
(Interested in joining the aphasia communication group, or want to learn more about the Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology Clinic? Contact shsclinic@illinois.edu or call 217-333-2205.)
Alexandra Carbajal wants to work with bilingual children as a speech-language pathologist. (Photo provided)
Alexandra Carbajal discovered her passion for her major, Speech and Hearing Science, during her freshman year at the University of Illinois. After that, everything else she found was through drive and dedication.
“I had a speech therapist when I was a kindergartener,” Carbajal said. “So, I know what a speech therapist says—I’ve had that background and familiarity with it. But I never even thought about it as a career until that day.”
The day Carbajal refers to is the day she visited the University of Illinois, after she was accepted as a student, to learn more about the university. Immediately, she was drawn to speech-language pathology, she said. She transferred to the Department of SHS within the College of Applied Health Sciences in her sophomore year.
Now a junior, Carbajal is one of five Humanities in Action scholars at Illinois. The HIA program works with students to remove some of the financial barriers that prevent undergraduate humanities students from taking advantage of community engagement opportunities.
Scholars are matched with a community partner in Champaign-Urbana and work toward a shared goal. As one of these scholars, Carbajal will work closely with a placement that is within her field.
Carbajal’s career goal is to become a bilingual Spanish speech-language pathologist for Spanish- and English-speaking children. She is majoring in speech and hearing science with a concentration in speech-language pathology.
Carbajal is also an intern at The Autism Program, where she participates in play group programs and creates visual resources for individuals on the autism spectrum. Additionally, she had the opportunity to volunteer at two elementary schools as a student teacher aide at the International Prep Academy in Champaign, and as a mentor at Dr. Preston L. Williams Jr. Elementary in Urbana.
“[TAP] has been a really great experience, definitely my favorite experience I’ve had so far. Because I want to be a speech therapist,” Carbajal said, “I know I will be working with the neurodiverse population. So that has really opened my perspective. Seeing their gratitude, they’re always so appreciative, and it just makes me more excited for what I’m going to be going into later.”
Alongside her SHS major, Carbajal also has a minor in Spanish.
“I just love the language,” Carbajal said. “I love the people. I love learning about different cultures, I love learning about how big the needs are for different Spanish communities. But I’ve always known I wanted to work with that population, specifically kids as well. That’s kind of my niche, bilingual kids, I’ve just always seen myself helping them out.”
The immediate effect of her work is one of Carbajal’s favorite parts about the field.
“I’d say just hearing the different stories from the families and the individuals that I work with, I think they all come from different backgrounds,” Carbajal said. “Each week, you get to see the progress that you’ve made. And you get to build a connection with them. And then knowing that you’re helping, not only them, but their families.”
Speech and Hearing Science Associate Professors Marie Moore Channell and Laura Mattie have long been interested in the development of communication and life skills in individuals with neurodevelopmental and intellectual disabilities.
Channell directs the Intellectual DisAbilities Communication Lab, where her research team works toward a comprehensive understanding of skills that support day-to-day communication for people with Down syndrome in order to identify and develop strategies for supporting their social and academic success. In Mattie’s Development in Neurogenetic Disabilities Lab, research addresses the early development of individuals with Down syndrome and fragile X syndrome. She, too, aims toward promoting the developmental success and well-being of people with these neurogenetic disabilities.
The scholars’ shared interests have led to fruitful collaborations in the past. They led a team of researchers who used a large, national database developed by the Down Syndrome Cognition Project to characterize variability in IQ, executive functioning, adaptive and challenging behavior, and autism symptomatology among individuals with Down syndrome.
Those in the “normative” group showed a profile of cognition and behavior that is typically represented in the literature on Down syndrome. Those in the “cognitive” group had lower cognitive scores and adaptive behaviors such as self-care and daily living skills than their peers with Down syndrome, along with high rates of autism symptoms.
Those in the “behavioral” group showed cognitive scores and adaptive behaviors similar to their peers with Down syndrome but had high rates of autism symptoms and challenging behaviors such as hyperactivity and conduct problems. Thus, with a large enough sample size, different patterns of autism symptoms and other characteristics can be seen across individuals with Down syndrome. The ultimate goal in precisely characterizing individual variability within Down syndrome is to optimize daily living through targeted treatments and interventions.
Overcoming diagnostic hurdles
Channell and Mattie currently are collaborating as principal and co-principal investigators on a study funded by the National Institutes of Health INCLUDE Project, which supports research related to the health and quality of life of individuals with Down syndrome. Working with researchers at Emory University, Johns Hopkins University and the Kennedy Krieger Institute, their study seeks to increase understanding of the co-occurrence of autism with Down syndrome to improve its diagnosis and treatment.
“There is a stereotype of people with Down syndrome as happy, social people who can’t have autism,” Channell said. “It’s more common than previously thought, but underdiagnosed.”
Interventions and therapies that people with autism receive could be a beneficial add-on to services offered to individuals with Down syndrome. Part of the problem in diagnosing autism in this population is that autism screening tools that were developed for the general population need to be adapted. To work toward the goal of developing better tools to screen for autism in people with Down syndrome, Channell, Mattie and their collaborators are conducting a nationwide survey of caregivers of youth with Down syndrome in which they are completing existing screening tools and other developmental questionnaires. The researchers will then examine and adapt the screening tools as needed so they can be used by practitioners to determine whom to refer for a full autism evaluation.
They are casting a wide net in hopes not only of representing all the varying abilities within Down syndrome, but also of including groups that are not well represented in the existing research.
“Underrepresentation is a big problem in research related to Down syndrome,” Mattie said. “We have a diverse board of stakeholders, are building relationships with the Black Down Syndrome Association, and targeting rural and Hispanic families as well.”
The questionnaires and other screening tools completed by caregivers are just one element of an autism diagnosis. There also is an in-person evaluation component, which is conducted by either developmental behavioral pediatricians or clinical psychologists who are specifically trained in autism diagnostics and assessment, as well as neuropsychological methods. The difficulty with this aspect of diagnosis is two-fold, Mattie said.
“First, the number of developmental behavioral pediatricians and clinical psychologists with this specialized training is limited, so there’s a bottleneck,” she said. “Also, while they may have expertise in autism, they don’t necessarily know about Down syndrome. So the ability to identify a true co-occurring condition is really lacking.”
Channell and Mattie may be conducting the first large-scale study using the broad screening measures doctors and clinicians give to families when autism is first suspected. Theirs may also be the first study that will explore the use of telehealth to conduct diagnostic evaluations of autism in children with Down syndrome.
“If we can figure out how to make that work, we can increase access to evaluations by specialists,” Channell said. They are working with a clinician at Kennedy Krieger, Natasha Ludwig, who will conduct the evaluations of autism in the telehealth sessions, and with Amy Cohen, director of the University of Illinois Autism Clinic, who will review and “score” the evaluations as well to ensure that evaluation tools will lead to consistent results when used by different clinicians.
With the dual focus on developing effective autism screening and diagnostic tools for individuals with Down syndrome and increasing access to specialists who are skilled in both autism and intellectual disability, Channell and Mattie intend to make a significant and lasting impact on improving the quality of life of a population that has historically been underdiagnosed and underserved. That’s good news for the individuals themselves and their caregivers, as well as the scores of clinicians who dedicate their professional lives to providing the best services possible to their clients.
Amy Brummel planned to catch the Illini’s Homecoming football game against Wisconsin last October and maybe grab some food at the College of Applied Health Sciences’ pregame tailgate. She had no idea it would lead to a research collaboration.
Brummel, a two-time alumna (B.S. in 1994, M.A. in 1997) of the Department of Speech and Hearing Science, has established a clinical research partnership with SHS Assistant Professor Meaghan McKenna to evaluate a literacy intervention protocol she developed.
The pairing came about innocuously. Brummel only went to the AHS tailgate after getting an email about a celebration of SHS’ 50th anniversary.
“My husband, Pete (B.S., Agricultural Economics, 1985), my son, Tyler, and I were already going to the football game,” Brummel said. “So I said, ‘Let’s go check out this tailgate and see if any of my classmates are there.’”
Brummel did not find any classmates, but when she got up to get food, she encountered Anna Pucilowski, an SHS teaching assistant professor who just happened to be handing out slices of cake.
“I asked, ‘What is the U. of I. researching in the area of literacy? I’m an SLP that specializes in literacy. So (Pucilowski) connected me with Dr. McKenna. And Dr. McKenna and I have been communicating ever since.”
They’ve been more than communicating. Brummel developed an research-based literacy intervention, so McKenna and Brummel are researching the efficacy of the intervention and are planning to disseminate the findings
“The ultimate goal of the intervention is to increase reading automaticity,” Brummel said. “That just means we’re going to improve the decoding ability, or oral reading fluency, of children. This is different than comprehension. This is pure decoding, sounding out words.”
As Brummel explained, when people read, they read automatically—it should be effortless. But when children are struggling to learn to read, they read sound by sound to decode—consciously retrieving each sound in every single word.
But Brummel said a literacy crisis—32 percent of fourth graders in the United States are reading below a proficient level—encouraged her to try to do more to help students. In her private practice, Amy’s Academics, parents ask, “What can I do to help my child?”
“I developed this intervention in my clinic. I provide it to parents for daily practice, and it has been extremely effective in improving automaticity and reading outcomes of my clients,” Brummel said.
Automacity is the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit, or, simply, reading without thinking. When children can read with automaticity, they think less about sounding out the words, allowing them to think more about comprehending what they are reading.
As Brummel explained, the intervention is both phonological—manipulating sounds in words—and orthographic—spelling patterns in words—and consists of two phases. The first phase allows for decoding and encoding practice on words with short vowels and what is called “high neighborhood density and high phonotactic probability.” Once automaticity is achieved, the child starts the second phase, which is decoding and encoding words with long vowels, she said.
“The intervention presents the opportunity to practice reading and spelling words while explicitly studying the orthography of the words and deleting and substituting initial phonemes in words,” Brummel said. “The extra exposure to phonological and orthographic patterns allows the child to obtain the additional practice necessary to create mental orthographic images to increase automaticity in their reading.”
McKenna said the intervention is important because “we need to recognize the contributions (speech-language pathologists) can make to speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Brummel agreed.
“We have such dire statistics for children who are struggling to read,” she said. “There are mental and emotional health issues as a result of not being able to learn to read in school, as well as decreased academic and occupational outcomes. I believe that learning to read is the most important thing happening in our schools. We need to make sure 100 percent of our students can read.”
Brummel taught phonetics as an undergraduate teaching assistant and researched morphology in multicultural settings as a graduate research assistant. That work inspired her to earn a clinical doctorate in speech-language pathology with a focus on language and literacy. She first developed the intervention in her private practice and provides it to parents for daily practice.
“It has been extremely effective in improving reading outcomes in my clients. The beauty of it is it’s research-based,” she said. “Dr. McKenna and I are both excited about this intervention because this is the first of its kind. I’ve been using it for years in my clinic, and the outcomes have been amazing. There is nothing like this in the school system, or in the private sector, or anywhere else that I’ve seen.”
Since meeting, Brummel and McKenna have engaged in monthly research practice partnership meetings to evaluate the intervention. They are now recruiting participants and will begin their first study in April.
“If we can do research on this and share it, it’s going to change the lives of children across our country and hopefully help all of these students struggling so they can catch up,” Brummel said. “They will have excellent academic and occupational outcomes, and we’ll help fight this literacy crisis.”
