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| Allison Gladfelter |
Does
your pet Husky wear cool glasses?
CISLL’s Deputy Director Dr. Allison Gladfelter’s’ does.
However, her Husky is a stuffed animal which lives in her HUSKIES research lab (HUman Speech KInematics Experimental Studies) at NIU. And the cool glasses are part of an infrared movement tracking system which directly captures how her research participants’ mouths move when they talk.
You see, Gladfelter studies word learning in children with autism. She uses the tracking system to measure the variability in lip and jaw movements when children speak. The glasses are connected to small round markers that are placed on the upper and lower lips and jaw and these detect movements which are recorded by a computer.
“I introduce the system on the Husky to show the children how they look and to put them at ease” laughed Gladfelter.
Children on the autism spectrum tend to repeat words and phrases in the exact same manner.
“This is one of the more debilitating characteristics of autism. Their repetitive speech patterns can cause them to stand out or sound unusual to others and severely curtails their social and work options” explained a more serious side of Gladfelter.
But Gladfelter has an idea.
Her idea comes from research in statistical learning. Statistical learning refers to a learner’s ability to attend to distributional information to extract meaning or structure from sensory input.
This body of research shows that variability during tasks of learning, rather than an adherence to a single pattern, is more beneficial for learning.
“Think about how to learn the perfect backhand swing in tennis. Conventional wisdom might say the best way is to practice the swing in the exact same way over and over again. However, research informs us that the best way is to vary the swing from one try to another.” Variability allows us to focus on what is common to different attempts, allowing us to distill the most important features, and this is true whether it is a tennis swing or the learning of the meaning of new words.
Gladfelter’s idea is that the variability of motor movements in the way children with autism speak may hold clues for how to improve their language learning in the future.
In her research, she has children with autism spectrum disorder and their typical peers learn and say new words. With her cool Husky glasses, she can measure precisely how their motor movements change from one attempt to the next.
“Based on my prior research, I expect to find a positive correlation between learning the meaning of new words and the amount of variability in motor movements when the child says new words over and over again” explained Gladfelter who is writing a federally-funded grant to test the hypothesis. Gladfelter encourages other researchers with expertise in repetitive behaviors in children with autism to reach out to her if they are interested in collaborating on this project.
If she does find a correlation, that doesn’t necessarily mean whether there is a causal link between motor variability and word learning, or the direction of causality if there is one. But one needs to establish a correlation before one can assess causation.
Depending on her findings, her research might point towards new ways that speech-language pathologists may help children with autism spectrum disorder. For example, the therapist might encourage more variety in the child’s speech productions during language learning tasks.
Practice makes perfect, as the old adage goes. But it might be more apt to say that variability during practice makes perfect.
And that goes for all Huskies, provided that they are not stuffed animals.
CISLL’s Deputy Director Dr. Allison Gladfelter’s’ does.
However, her Husky is a stuffed animal which lives in her HUSKIES research lab (HUman Speech KInematics Experimental Studies) at NIU. And the cool glasses are part of an infrared movement tracking system which directly captures how her research participants’ mouths move when they talk.
You see, Gladfelter studies word learning in children with autism. She uses the tracking system to measure the variability in lip and jaw movements when children speak. The glasses are connected to small round markers that are placed on the upper and lower lips and jaw and these detect movements which are recorded by a computer.
“I introduce the system on the Husky to show the children how they look and to put them at ease” laughed Gladfelter.
Children on the autism spectrum tend to repeat words and phrases in the exact same manner.
“This is one of the more debilitating characteristics of autism. Their repetitive speech patterns can cause them to stand out or sound unusual to others and severely curtails their social and work options” explained a more serious side of Gladfelter.
But Gladfelter has an idea.
Her idea comes from research in statistical learning. Statistical learning refers to a learner’s ability to attend to distributional information to extract meaning or structure from sensory input.
This body of research shows that variability during tasks of learning, rather than an adherence to a single pattern, is more beneficial for learning.
“Think about how to learn the perfect backhand swing in tennis. Conventional wisdom might say the best way is to practice the swing in the exact same way over and over again. However, research informs us that the best way is to vary the swing from one try to another.” Variability allows us to focus on what is common to different attempts, allowing us to distill the most important features, and this is true whether it is a tennis swing or the learning of the meaning of new words.
Gladfelter’s idea is that the variability of motor movements in the way children with autism speak may hold clues for how to improve their language learning in the future.
In her research, she has children with autism spectrum disorder and their typical peers learn and say new words. With her cool Husky glasses, she can measure precisely how their motor movements change from one attempt to the next.
“Based on my prior research, I expect to find a positive correlation between learning the meaning of new words and the amount of variability in motor movements when the child says new words over and over again” explained Gladfelter who is writing a federally-funded grant to test the hypothesis. Gladfelter encourages other researchers with expertise in repetitive behaviors in children with autism to reach out to her if they are interested in collaborating on this project.
If she does find a correlation, that doesn’t necessarily mean whether there is a causal link between motor variability and word learning, or the direction of causality if there is one. But one needs to establish a correlation before one can assess causation.
Depending on her findings, her research might point towards new ways that speech-language pathologists may help children with autism spectrum disorder. For example, the therapist might encourage more variety in the child’s speech productions during language learning tasks.
Practice makes perfect, as the old adage goes. But it might be more apt to say that variability during practice makes perfect.
And that goes for all Huskies, provided that they are not stuffed animals.
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