Research Symposium

BIO

Saheli Katya Shah Brennan is a second-year undergraduate student in the School of Communication Science and Disorders (CSD), pursuing minors in Child Development and Anthropology, with the goal of eventually obtaining a Clinical Doctoral Degree and Ph.D. in Speech Language Pathology to become a school-based Speech Language Pathologist (SLP). Through UROP, Brennan has had the honor of assisting on the APPLES (Academic Progress in Phonological Learning of Elementary Schoolers) project in the CLaSS Lab under Dr. Kelly Farquharson in the School of CSD to help holistically examine the impacts of having a speech sound disorder on elementary school students by scoring administered tests and inputting data into RedCap. Recently, she has had the privilege of working under two graduate students as a Research Assistant: notably Ms. Angelica Bernabe in the School of CSD, where Brennan assisted with transcribing interviews that helped understand the various perspectives on stuttering disorders in individuals with stutters; and Ms. Audrey Yarish in the FSU Anthropology Department, where Brennan assisted with participant recruitment, questionnaire formulation, administering interviews, coding interviews, and data analysis to better understand how one’s social network influences nicotine usage. Outside of research, she is always excited to help lead and organize her weekly EngageTLH trip to the FSU Food4Thought Pantry to help process and stock donations from community partners, as well as plan and host socials for the Service Scholar community as the FSU Service Scholars Social Chairperson. In Brennan’s free time, she enjoys cooking for loved ones, working out, nature, and songwriting.

Aspects of Life Impacted by SSDs in Early Elementary Students

Abstract

In the Academic Progress in Phonological Learning for Elementary Schools (APPLES) Project, the main question being answered is “what works for whom” when it comes to determining treatment for speech sound disorders (SSD). There are 46 distinct approaches for intervention-based methods in treating children with an SSD (Baker, 2011), but there isn’t much evidence on which approaches work best for specific subsets within SSD. Approximately 8 to 9 percent of young children in the U.S. have been diagnosed with an SSD (NIH, 2025), each of them at risk of problems related to speech production, memory, and emotional well-being, if their SSD is not addressed appropriately. Eighty four K-2 children in Leon County and Whitman County elementary schools are given a set of standardized tests over multiple sessions each academic semester. The tests are then scored, and all data is entered into a RedCap database for further analysis. The results presented are a representation of one academic term in a 4-year-long project; therefore, all results are preliminary. From the data, there is a positive correlation between age and morphological awareness and age and phonological memory, but a negative correlation between age and the amount of perceived happiness towards SSDs. Further studies could apply the aforementioned results to intervention-based methods for subsets of SSD and report back on effectiveness. Overall, the findings show that younger children struggle more with speech production and memory, while older children struggle more with their emotional well-being in relation to how they perceive their SSD.

Keywords: SSD, children, students, speech, development