Author: Lauren Doyel | Major: Communication Disorders

My name is Lauren Doyel and I am a Communication Sciences and Disorders major. This past year, I have assisted in a Fall 2021 project headed by master’s student, Samadhi Devayalage. Although Dr. Andy Bowers was my Honors Thesis mentor, Samadhi’s project was headed up by Dr. Lisa Bowers and Dr. Rachel Glade in the Communication Disorders and Sciences department. The entire team was able to travel to Little Rock, AR to support Samadhi as she presented the project at the ArkSHA conference.

Our project, entitled “The Effects of Colorful Semantics on Children Who Are Hearing Impaired” began with a discovery that children who are deaf or hard of hearing have more difficulty learning sentence structure and grammar rules than children who are not. Samadhi and her mentors sought to find out if the colorful semantics approach, popular among European schools, would be helpful in improving this disparity.  The Colorful Semantic approach is one that associates each part of speech to a color in an effort to enhance learning. For instance, blue = noun while yellow = verb. Samadhi spent the summer conducting intervention sessions using the colorful semantic approach, along with periodic language samples to track progress. She had a specific interest in improving correct sentence structure among her participants. In order to come up with quantitative results, the children’s language was analyzed using a software program called SALT which was primarily my Honor’s Project.

Although I assisted Samadhi and her team throughout the process, the language analysis that followed is primarily what I focused on. I transcribed each language sample from before, during, and after the intervention process. One difficulty that presented itself throughout the project was the use of technology. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Samadhi utilized Zoom to conduct Tele-therapy. While I was transcribing, there were many times that I was able to make out what the child had said due to it being a recording. I do believe it would have been easier if we were able to conduct the project in person. Nevertheless, I believe we had some great language samples and were able to get a lot out of each Zoom session. Although we have not yet compiled the results, we are able to draw rough conclusions to conclude that Colorful Semantics did improve the children’s language. This spring, I will be working weekly alongside Dr. Lisa Bowers to run the transcribed language samples through the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) program. This program will allow us to track many points of analysis such as mean length of utterances, number of omissions (word or syllable), pause times, words per minute, and errors made. By using this information, we will be able to find out exactly how each child’s language improved throughout the study.

This project was especially useful because there are not many like it. Although research has been conducted regarding the grammar disparity among children with hearing loss, the effects of the Colorful Semantics approach have not been studied. It is our team’s hope that using our research, other clinicians may be able to further research this approach or even use it in their practice. I am very grateful to the Honors College for awarding me the research grant so that we were able to make this project possible.