Glynnis E. DuBois, Speech-language Pathology

Supervisor
Professor Monika Molnar

Thesis
Using Group Music Activities with Families to Support School-Readiness Skills in Preschool Children with Hearing Loss.”

This thesis reviewed the challenges faced by children with hearing loss and their families at school entry and explored how to support school readiness skills using music as a medium. A music and movement curriculum was developed using Neurologic Music Therapies. This was then used in a twelve-week intervention with preschool children and parent participants. Both pre and postintervention standardized testing was used as well as a postintervention parent interview. Results for the addition of this kind of group intervention to support areas of development and provide ongoing strategies and resources for this population was promising.

Two manuscripts were published from this thesis and during the course of the PhD, three book chapters were co-authored.

4. This postdoc project is a collaborative validation study. It involves a new artificial intelligence (AI) powered application developed by ‘Babbly’ which tracks communication during the babbling stages of babies 6-18 months of age. This convenient app, once validated, could be used by clinicians to compare speech and language development to known benchmarks in typically developing children. Families will be able to upload audio/videos of their baby’s communicative interactions and the app will analyze the communication progression over time.

Once validated, the AI will be used to compare datasets of typically developing babies to those at risk for atypical development to identify any differences between the groups in terms of type, frequency, or length of utterance. Any deviations from typical developmental trajectories could then be flagged facilitating early referral and assessment. The goal is to enable the earliest identification of language delays in Canadian children.

This project is funded for two years by the Mitacs Elevate program.