Faculty Research Interests

Dr. Maria Diana Gonzales

Dr. Gonzales' research interests include the developmental outcomes of infants discharged from Neonatal Intensive Care units. Additional research interests include the parent-child interaction skills exhibited by bilingual parents with typically developing and language disordered infants as well as the emergent literacy skills of typically developing and language disordered bilingual preschoolers. Dr. Gonzales is also interested in developing more effective methods of student mentoring and infusing diversity issues into the curriculum.

Dr. Frances Burns

Dr. Burns' research interests include identifying predictors of response to language and reading intervention in children with specific language impairment from linguistically diverse populations. She is currently conducting a study of dialect density and response to intervention and a study of grammatical morpheme production in preschool children. She has in the past and continues to investigate the narrative skills of typically-developing children and those with language impairment.

Dr. Rahul Chakraborty

Dr. Chakraborty's interests focus on how linguistic constructs (e.g. phonological, morphosyntactic) are instantiated biologically. Using fine grained kinematic analysis he explores the phenomenon of "linguistic interference/transfer" and thereby attempt to understand how and to what extent specific rules of first and second language interact in non-native speakers' foreign accent. His current research projects include a crosslinguistic study examining physiological underpinnings of speech production and an investigation of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in Bengali speaking children.

Dr. Celeste Domsch

Dr. Domsch's research interests include lexical growth in children who are late to talk, and she is now collecting data on longer-term outcomes in this population. She has co-authored a publication on the development of C-V coarticulation and has presented at regional and national conferences.

Dr. Valarie Fleming

Dr. Fleming's research interests include understanding the effects of cognitive impairments on communication ability in adults. Specifically, her interests focus on executive and memory processes and how they influence the comprehension and production of discourse in clinical and nonclinical populations of adults. Dr. Fleming is also interested in examining cultural influences on the access and utilization of community and therapeutic services in normal and disordered populations. Current research projects include Cognitive Flexibility and Discourse Production in Older and Younger Adults, Discourse Production in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Health Literacy in Older and Younger Adults.

Dr. Adam Jacks

Dr. Jacks' research interests are in the area of investigating the neurophysiological underpinnings of speech motor abilities in normal and disordered speakers, acoustic markers of speech disorders, and the influence of perceptual abilities in speech motor control. He has authored several papers on acquired and childhood apraxia of speech and presented papers at national and international conferences.

Anna Fox

Ms. Fox's current research agenda involves data collection on a student to student mentoring program that is being designed and implemented in the Department of Communication Disorders. As a clinical supervisor, she is also interested in investigating evidence based assessment and intervention practices.

Therese Kosary

Ms. Kosary's research interests include areas of autism, phonological processing disorders and early language development.

Jana Proff

Ms. Proff's research interests involve neurogenic disorders including the speech, language, and cognitive changes that survivors of stroke and traumatic brain injury demonstrate.

Lori Stiritz

Lori Stiritz 's research is in the area of auditory processing disorders. She is one of few audiologists performing this type of assessment in Central Texas. Specifically, she is interested in the effects of auditory processing disorders on learning to read. She also is involved in establishing effective remediations for this type of problem.

Renee Wendel

Mrs. Wendel's research interests include literacy acquisition in children with Autism, cognitive factors influencing the acquisition of communication skills in children with autism/ASD, technology applications in clinical service delivery, student outcomes in clinical education and training, and the relationship between gender and maternity/paternity on scoring procedures of standardized tests.