Attitudes Toward Informational Health Videos among People with Intellectual Disabilities

An intellectual disability (ID) can be defined as a limit to a person\u27s ability to learn and function in daily life when compared to an expected level. Due to these differences, a person with ID can face more challenges in daily life, including those that impact their health. Special Olympics Vermont (SOVT) is an organization that hosts athletic events and competitions for people with an ID. We worked with them to formulate a plan for providing educational resources for people with an ID. We created educational videos with corresponding one-page pamphlets containing material and imagery that was relatable to the athletes with ID, to inspire positive changes in their health habits. We hypothesized that if content and material relatable to SOVT athletes were incorporated into health education videos, then athletes would learn more about healthy habits that they could apply to their lives. We created surveys that evaluated the reception of the educational videos, whether athletes learned from the videos, and if they planned on incorporating what they learned into their lives.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1316/thumbnail.jp

Relationships Between Auditory Brainstem Responses & Timed-Sentence Comprehension

The goal of this project was to observe relationships between auditory brainstem response (ABR) and sentence comprehension in college students, answering the question: does complex sentence comprehension show a link with brainstem processing? This project addresses the need to study subcortical contributions to language comprehension in order to fully understand language processing, as most studies revolve around the cortex. Sentence comprehension was tested through completion of a task in which participants hear a sentence before being prompted to choose the correct match between two pictures. Twenty total sentences of four variously-complex types were randomly presented. Participants were monolingual English-speaking adults between ages 18 to 27 with normal hearing. They completed a hearing screening, the timed-sentence comprehension task, and a standardized vocabulary test. ABRs of each participant were recorded as they heard one-syllable sounds. Different components were analyzed to assess participants’ wave repeatability in response to hearing the same sound and the ability to differentiate sounds. These measures were statistically tested along with participants’ accuracy and reaction times in the timed-sentence comprehension task for correlations. Easier sentences resulted in higher scores and faster reaction times, with reaction time related to how well the brainstem processes different complex speech stimuli. By observing and quantifying individual variation, the findings demonstrate involvement of the brainstem in neural language encoding. This project informs future endeavors of the relationships between ABR measures and complex sentence comprehension. Moving forward, researchers can use subcortical assessments to study various aspects of language in different populations