The Promise of Discovery Season 5, Episode 5
It’s important for speech language pathologists to learn about children’s grammar because grammar deficits are often a sign of a language impairment. For this experiment, researchers had parents and speech language pathologists fill out a checklist (Children’s Communication Checklist-2), to report on children communication skills, and then we compared the results. We learned that parents and speech language pathologists both identified speech deficits in children but that parents are not sensitive to differences in their children’s grammar.
Featuring: Jane (Janie) Sommer Eppstein, Ph.D. Student; Vanderbilt University
Interviewer: Melanie Schuele, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Hearing and Speech Sciences and a Vanderbilt Kennedy Center Member
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The Promise of Discovery Season 5, Episode 5
It’s important for speech language pathologists to learn about children’s grammar because grammar deficits are often a sign of a language impairment. For this experiment, researchers had parents and speech language pathologists fill out a checklist (Children’s Communication Checklist-2), to report on children communication skills, and then we compared the results. We learned that parents and speech language pathologists both identified speech deficits in children but that parents are not sensitive to differences in their children’s grammar.
Featuring: Jane (Janie) Sommer Eppstein, Ph.D. Student; Vanderbilt University
Interviewer: Melanie Schuele, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Hearing and Speech Sciences and a Vanderbilt Kennedy Center Member
Visual perception with motor practice leads to lasting brain changes that support learning
Vanderbilt Kennedy Center
13 minutes 18 seconds
9 months ago
Visual perception with motor practice leads to lasting brain changes that support learning
The Promise of Discovery Season 5, Episode 4
This research explored how combining visual perception with motor practice—specifically drawing unfamiliar symbols—leads to lasting brain changes that support learning. Participants trained by drawing new letter-like symbols over four days while researchers tracked their brain activity using fMRI scans before, immediately after, and one-week post-training. The after-training scans revealed significant differences in activity within several brain regions—including the motor cortex—during the perception of trained compared to untrained symbols that were greater one-week post-training. This suggests that hands-on, visual-motor learning builds long-term changes in how the brain processes visual information, with potential implications for educational strategies and interventions.
Featuring: Shelby Buettner, Graduate Student, Vanderbilt University
Interviewer: Sophia Vinci-Booher, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychology & Human Development and a Vanderbilt Kennedy Center Member
Vanderbilt Kennedy Center
The Promise of Discovery Season 5, Episode 5
It’s important for speech language pathologists to learn about children’s grammar because grammar deficits are often a sign of a language impairment. For this experiment, researchers had parents and speech language pathologists fill out a checklist (Children’s Communication Checklist-2), to report on children communication skills, and then we compared the results. We learned that parents and speech language pathologists both identified speech deficits in children but that parents are not sensitive to differences in their children’s grammar.
Featuring: Jane (Janie) Sommer Eppstein, Ph.D. Student; Vanderbilt University
Interviewer: Melanie Schuele, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Hearing and Speech Sciences and a Vanderbilt Kennedy Center Member
