The Doctor of Audiology is a professional degree for an audiologist. The AuD program is designed to produce audiologists who are skilled in providing diagnostic, rehabilitative, and other services associated with hearing, balance, tinnitus management, and related audiological fields. These individuals help patients with hearing problems primarily by diagnosing hearing loss and fitting hearing assistive devices.
The American Speech–Language–Hearing Association (ASHA) is a professional association for speech–language pathologists, audiologists, and speech, language, and hearing scientists in the United States and internationally. The association reported over 234,000 members and affiliates in its 2023 report.
Auditory integration training (AIT) is a procedure pioneered in France by Guy Bérard. Bérard promoted AIT as a cure for clinical depression and suicidal tendencies, along with what he said were very positive results for dyslexia and autism, although there has been very little empirical evidence regarding this assertion. AIT typically involves 20 half-hour sessions over 10 days listening to specially filtered and modulated music. It was used in the early 1990s as a treatment for autism. Since, it has been promoted as a treatment for ADHD, depression, and a wide variety of other disorders. AIT has not met scientific standards for efficacy that would justify its use as a treatment for any condition.
Speech–language pathology is a healthcare and academic discipline concerning the evaluation, treatment, and prevention of communication disorders, including expressive and mixed receptive-expressive language disorders, voice disorders, speech sound disorders, speech disfluency, pragmatic language impairments, and social communication difficulties, as well as swallowing disorders across the lifespan. It is an allied health profession regulated by professional bodies including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and Speech Pathology Australia. The field of speech-language pathology is practiced by a clinician known as a speech-language pathologist (SLP) or a speech and language therapist (SLT). SLPs also play an important role in the screening, diagnosis, and treatment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), often in collaboration with pediatricians and psychologists.
Auditory processing disorder (APD), rarely known as King-Kopetzky syndrome, is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting the way the brain processes sounds. Individuals with APD usually have normal structure and function of the ear, but cannot process the information they hear in the same way as others do, which leads to difficulties in recognizing and interpreting sounds, especially the sounds composing speech. It is thought that these difficulties arise from dysfunction in the central nervous system.
Stuttering therapy is any of the various treatment methods that attempt to either reduce stuttering to some degree in an individual or cope with negative impacts of living with a stutter or social stigma. Stuttering can be seen as a challenge to treat because there is a lack of consensus about therapy, and there is no cure for stuttering.
Ingo R. Titze is a voice scientist and executive director of the National Center for Voice and Speech and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He also teaches at the Summer Vocology Institute, also housed at the University of Utah. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa and has written several books relating to the human voice.
Developmental verbal dyspraxia (DVD), also known as childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and developmental apraxia of speech (DAS), is a condition in which an individual has problems saying sounds, syllables and words. This is not because of muscle weakness or paralysis. The brain has problems planning to move the body parts needed for speech. The individual knows what they want to say, but their brain has difficulty coordinating the muscle movements necessary to say those words.
Larry Humes is a Distinguished Professor of Hearing Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington.
Nan Bernstein Ratner is a professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park. Ratner is a board-recognized specialist in child language disorders.
Susan Ellis Weismer is a language and communication scientist known for her work on language development in children with specific language impairment and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). She is the Oros Family Chair and Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she is a Principal Investigator and Director of the Language Processes Lab. She has also served as the Associate Dean for Research, College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
James Bruce Tomblin is a language and communication scientist and an expert on the epidemiology and genetics of developmental language disorders (DLD). He holds the position of Professor Emeritus of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa.
Marilyn Adrienne Nippold is language and communications scientist with expertise in adolescent language development and disorders. She is Professor in Communication Disorders and Sciences at the University of Oregon. Nippold is author of several books on adolescent language development, including Later Language Development: The School-age and Adolescent Years and Language Sampling with Adolescents: Implications for Intervention.
Leslie Altman Rescorla was a developmental psychologist and expert on language delay in toddlers. Rescorla was Professor of Psychology on the Class of 1897 Professorship of Science and Director of the Child Study Institute at Bryn Mawr College. She was a licensed and school certified psychologist known for her longitudinal research on late talkers. In the 1980s, she created the Language Development Survey, a widely used tool for screening toddlers for possible language delays. Rescorla worked with Thomas M. Achenbach in developing the manual for the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA) used to measure adaptive and maladaptive behavior in children.
Elena Margaret Plante is a researcher and speech-language pathologist specializing in developmental language disorders in children and adults. She holds the position of Professor and previously was Head of the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences (SLHS) at the University of Arizona (UA). She is the principal investigator at the eponymous Plante Laboratory at UA. Plante is also affiliated with the Cognitive Science program at UA.
Sandra Gordon-Salant is an American audiologist. She is a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is also director of the doctoral program in clinical audiology. Gordon-Salant investigates the effects of aging and hearing loss on auditory processes, as well as signal enhancement devices for hearing-impaired listeners. She is the senior editor of the 2010 book, The Aging Auditory System. Gordon-Salant has served as editor of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.
Janna Beth Oetting is an American researcher and speech-language pathologist specializing in the cross-dialectal study of childhood language development and developmental language disorders.
Judith Ann Cooper is an American speech pathologist serving as the deputy director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). She was the acting director of the NIDCD from June 2018 to August 2019. Cooper is an elected fellow of the American Speech–Language–Hearing Association.
Rhea Paul is an American clinical language scientist known for her work in the field of speech-language pathology. She was Founding Chair in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology in the College of Health Professions at Sacred Heart University and a research scientist and affiliate of Haskins Laboratories at Yale University.
Laurence Baker Leonard is an American speech pathologist and linguist, recognized for his research on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in children. As a leading scholar in this field, he has been selected to receive the biennial Callier Prize in Communication Disorders. He also holds the Rachel E. Stark Distinguished Professorship at Purdue University, where he directs research on language acquisition difficulties across different languages. Dr. Leonard's research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health for 26 years. He has authored numerous publications on the phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic challenges faced by children with SLI, and his work has greatly influenced treatment methodologies for language impairments. Leonard earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1973.
