Congratulations to Ally Godsey for successfully defending her undergraduate Honors Thesis!
Last Friday, April 14, undergraduate HESP honors student, Allison (Ally) Godsey, successfully defended her Honors Thesis. Ally has presented her research on stuttering at many conferences while simultaneously developing her Honors Thesis: It's About Time: Parent-Child Turn Taking on Early Stuttering. This multi year project has also attracted an award from a major research conference! Read about Ally's experience and thesis below:
"I remember coming into college I thought research was something that only professors and biologists did and had no idea the extent to which I could get involved. At the end of my Freshman year, I stumbled upon the Language Fluency Lab. I immediately became interested in the topic of stuttering. At lab meetings, I would ask questions.
Eventually, Dr. Ratner suggested that I do my own research on parent-child interaction in early stuttering. My research led to me applying to the HESP Undergraduate Honors Program. This led to me making a close group of friends in HESP that shared my interest in research. Over the next 3 years, I went to many conferences and presented my work while simultaneously developing my Honors Thesis: It's About Time: Parent-Child Turn Taking on Early Stuttering.
My advice would be it is never too early to get involved! Find the things you are interested in and ask all of the questions you can because it will help you in the long run. Everyone in the HESP department is here to support you and help you in any way they can! "
Title: It’s About Time: Parent-Child Turn-Taking in Early Stuttering
Abstract: Many professional and self-help organizations (e.g. ASHA and SFA) present advice to lengthen the time between speaking turns in early parent-child interactions in an effort to assist the child who stutters (CWS). However, only a very limited amount of research conducted using small numbers of children supports the suggestion that structured turn-taking may have the ability to reduce the number of disfluencies produced by the child who stutters. In addition, the longitudinal effect of increasing the length between speaking turns has yet to be analyzed; Hence, we do not know whether the suggestion to increase the time between speaking turns has any effect on the persistence or recovery from stuttering. Our study aims to look at this advice at stuttering onset in a longitudinal study by analyzing mother-child play interactions in 80 files containing children and their mothers (now archived at FluencyBank) for whom stuttering outcomes are known.
