Doctoral Students
Melissa Boone |
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Melissa Boone is an ASHA certified speech-language pathologist and doctoral student in the Communication Sciences and Disorders program. She received a bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and Spanish from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009 and a master’s degree in Speech-Language Pathology with a Bilingual English-Spanish Certificate from Marquette University in 2012. Her primary interests are issues related to listener perception of observable characteristics of language difficulty and language impairment in linguistically diverse populations. |
| Email: [email protected] | |
Mariam Kavakci |
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Mariam Kavakci is an ASHA certified speech-language pathologist and a doctoral student in the Communication Sciences and Disorders program. In 2012, she earned an M.S. in Communication Disorders and completed a one-year clinical fellowship at the Callier Center for Communication Disorders in 2013. Mariam’s research focuses on the relationship between procedural motor learning, implicit statistical learning, and various aspects of language processing. |
| Email: [email protected] | |
Blair Miller |
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Blair received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Baylor University in 2004, and her Masters of Science in Communication Disorders from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2006. After working as a licensed Speech-Language Pathologist for Richardson Independent School District for three years, Blair’s interests in language and literacy development prompted her to pursue her PhD. Her specific focus includes risk factors for low language skills, and investigating how semantic and situation-based information influence reading speed in typically developing children. |
| Email: [email protected] | |
Jana Mueller |
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Jana Mueller is a doctoral student in the Communication Sciences and Disorders program at UTD. Prior to entering the program, she was a speech-language pathologist for adolescents and adults with neurologic disorders. Broadly, her research interests include identifying tools for accurate classification of cognitive-communication disorders in adolescents and adults with acquired brain injury, and identifying effective treatment for cognitive-communication disorders following acquired brain injury. Her current research involves using pupillometry to measure cognitive load and identify improvement in cognitive efficiency with training. |
| Email: [email protected] | |
Melissa Sherman |
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Melissa Sherman is a PhD student in Communication Sciences and Disorders (COMD). She holds a Bachelor's degree in Cognitive Science, and Master's degrees in Cognitive Science and Communication Sciences and Disorders. Melissa is currently a research assistant, where her duties include managing the SLCC Lab, maintaining the SLCC and CTECH websites, and assisting research projects. Melissa is interested in how children learn multisyllabic words. Specifically, she studies how smilarities between the sound forms of multisyllabic words might make them easier or harde to learn. Melissa plans to study this phenomena from a corpus-based approach using expressive langauge transcripts. |
| Email: [email protected] | |
| Personal Website: www.utdallas.edu/~mesh | |
Haiying Yuan |
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Haiying Yuan is a fourth year doctoral student in the Communication Sciences and Disorders program. She earned a master degree in Applied Cognition and Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2012. Her research interests focus on the diagnosis of children with Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder and how to differentiate children with Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder from children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Children with Specific Language Impairment. Her current research is to develop a list of test items for assessing diagnostic characteristics of Social Communication Disorder defined by DSM-5. |
| Email: [email protected] | |