Professor Awarded $435K NIH Grant

Montclair State Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders Elaine Hitchcock has been awarded a federal grant toward her research in telepractice delivery of speech therapy. The National Institutes of Health R15 grant for $435,000 is Hitchcock’s second NIH grant.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted ongoing shifts toward telepractice delivery of speech therapy, as well as online collection of research data in the study of speech perception and production,” says Hitchcock. “This research will meet a public health need by evaluating the efficacy of speech intervention supplemented with real-time visual-acoustic biofeedback when delivered using remote technologies. It will also develop an online battery to assess perception of targeted speech sounds and test the effects of online auditory-perceptual training for children who present with speech production errors and atypical auditory perception.”

The current award will support an ongoing collaboration in this research domain with New York University and Syracuse University. In 2019, Hitchcock was awarded a $271,000 sub-award for the first year of a five-year, $1.4 million collaboration with colleagues at New York University and Syracuse University for a study to advance both the understanding of speech production as well as the remediation of residual speech errors in school-aged children.