Katarina L. Haley (PhD, CCC-SLP) and Adam Jacks (Phd, CCC-SLP) recently participated in the Swallow your Pride podcast where they talked about navigating challenges of speech disorders after experiencing strokes. During the podcast Jacks and Haley share the emerging findings on new perceptual and acoustic measures shaping the future of stroke-related speech assessments. Haley highlights that while their research looks to understand how the brain works and reacts to stroke, they also aim to improve practice for speech language pathologists in assessing stroke patients.
Jacks highlights that patients who experience aphasia and apraxia of speech each have their own profile. Some have neural muscular weakness while others have various overlapping conditions which the field of SLP tends to overlook. This group of researchers hopes that their findings can expand how SLPs perform their assessments with consideration for the overlap between apraxia of speech, dysarthria, and aphasia.
Their current sample size encompasses about 450 stroke patients. They look for features that are common after stroke and based on that make decisions about what profile these patients fit. The patterns they identify are used to create treatment plans. At the end of the research, they plan to develop a new assessment that SLPs diagnose and intervene.