Maria Grigos and Si On Yoon received $3.16M and $3.79M, respectively, from the National Institutes of Health for multidisciplinary, cross-institutional research projects.
Two faculty from NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders (CSD) have received five-year grants totaling nearly $7 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop research in the fields of childhood apraxia of speech and conversational memory in aging adults.
Maria Grigos Receives $3.16M from NIDCD
Maria Grigos, professor, received a $3.16 million grant from NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) for her project titled “A randomized controlled trial of motor-based intervention for childhood apraxia of speech—DTTC-Connect.”
Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a persistent motor speech disorder that impairs daily communication. In a previous NIH grant, Grigos studied the efficacy of Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing (DTTC), a motor-based intervention designed to improve the planning and coordination of speech movements at the word level, rather than targeting individual speech sounds in isolation, as a treatment modality for children with CAS.
“Research shows that while DTTC is effective at helping children with CAS produce words more accurately in a clinical setting, many still struggle to carry those improvements into longer sentences and everyday conversations,” says Grigos. “Our goal with this new study is to bridge that gap, helping children move from producing single words to using more accurate and natural speech in their daily lives.”
The latest NIH grant supports the first randomized controlled trial to systematically examine connected speech outcomes in the treatment of CAS. The study will evaluate DTTC-Connect, a novel adaptation of DTTC that integrates phrase-level practice throughout treatment to help children carry improvements in speech production from individual words into connected speech.
Grigos and her collaborators—Julie Case (PhD ’19, MA’ 07,Communicative Sciences and Disorders), a Dean’s Alumni Advisory Board member and associate professor at Hofstra University, and Ying Lu, associate professor in Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities at NYU Steinhardt—aim to include nearly 70 children with CAS between the ages of approximately 3.5 and 13 years, with half being seen at NYU Steinhardt and half at Hofstra.
With Lu’s expertise as a statistician, the team will evaluate how DTTC-Connect improves speech accuracy, intelligibility, and everyday communication in children with CAS, including those with co-occurring conditions, such as autism or genetic disorders. Using optical facial tracking technology, the research team will also examine whether lip and jaw movements become more refined and coordinated over the course of treatment, providing insight into changes in speech motor control. Together, these findings will help determine whether DTTC-Connect leads to lasting improvements in connected speech and meaningful communication in daily life.
This study will also include a subset of children from Grigos’ earlier study to examine whether previous DTTC treatment influences their response to DTTC-Connect and to better understand the trajectory of speech motor development across phases of treatment.
For Grigos, a key focus is on communicative participation—whether improvements in speech translate into meaningful changes in how children communicate and engage with others in daily life. To better understand this impact, the research team will gather perspectives from both children and their families about their everyday communication experiences, including confidence, ease of communication and participation in social interactions.
“It’s not enough to know that a child can produce words more accurately during therapy,” says Grigos. “We also want to hear from children and their families about whether those improvements are making a difference in their everyday lives. Ultimately, we want to understand not just how treatment changes speech, but how it helps children communicate with greater confidence and participate more fully in the world around them.”
Si On Yoon Receives $3.79M from NIH
Si On Yoon, associate professor, received a $3.79 million NIH grant for her project titled “A Cognitive-Linguistic Engagement Model in Aging and Recall (CLEAR): Uncovering mechanisms of conversation memory across cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s disease.”
Along with collaborators biostatistician Daphna Harel, professor of Applied Statistics at NYU Steinhardt, and Arjun V. Masurkar, a cognitive and behavioral neurologist at NYU Langone and an associate professor of neurology and neuroscience at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the study seeks to understand how aging adults both with and without Alzheimer’s disease remember things from conversations and explore memory support techniques that could potentially improve retention.
“When people are in conversation with one another, we remember things that were said so we can use them the next time we speak and maintain that connection with people,” says Yoon. “For people living with dementia, their memory impairment can make remembering conversations more difficult, which can be detrimental to their quality of life.”
Forgetting conversational details can be especially dangerous in medical settings.
“If someone doesn’t remember what they’ve been told by a doctor—such as how often to take a certain medication or when an important follow-up appointment is—they can’t follow their advice,” says Yoon. “This study will allow us to measure what conversational memory looks like in a medical context over time in different populations.”
The study will recruit a mix of healthy aging adults as well as those living with dementia. They will undergo a simulated medical consultation with a speech-language pathologist (SLP) and then be asked to recall specific information they were given at varying intervals: immediately, after one week, and after two weeks.
During the sessions, some participants will also be offered different scaffolds to help support their conversational retention—such as repeating the SLP’s directions back to them in their own words, writing the instructions down, or both—to see what is most helpful.
Yoon and her colleagues see many potential benefits from memory support for aging individuals, from increased quality of life through better communication and increased independence, as well as benefits for their caregivers.
“In addition to helping people living with dementia, this work also has the potential to relieve some of the burden that caregivers experience as they try to stay connected to their loved one and ensure their health and safety,” says Yoon. “If we can demonstrate a valid method for helping people to remember things better, it's going to be very impactful for a lot of people.”
Related Articles
NYU Steinhardt Co-Hosts Workshop on Trauma-Informed Care for Asian American Communities
Communicative Sciences and Disorders Student Wins 2026 PhD Live! Competition
