Dr. Tara McAllister’s study, Correcting Residual Errors with Spectral, ULtrasound, Traditional Speech therapy Randomized Controlled Trial (C-RESULTS RCT; McAllister & Hill), compares speech therapy with and without biofeedback technology, is well underway. Data collection for a preliminary single-case experimental study has been completed and submitted for presentation at the 2020 convention of the American Speech-Language Hearing Association, and a paper preregistering the protocol for the randomized controlled trial component of the study was published in BMC Pediatrics. (McAllister, T., Preston, J. L., Hitchcock, E. R., & Hill, J. (2020). Protocol for Correcting Residual Errors with Spectral, ULtrasound, Traditional Speech therapy Randomized Controlled Trial (C-RESULTS RCT). BMC pediatrics, 20(1), 66.) Data collection for the RCT was suspended due to COVID-19, but the research team has pivoted to online data collection for a pilot study investigating the efficacy of biofeedback delivered via screen-sharing over Zoom. Telehealth is a huge topic in the speech pathology research community at the moment, and we hope to be able to make a meaningful contribution with this research, even though it represents a detour from our original plans.

A co-authored paper by Dr. McAllister, "Using Crowdsourced Listeners’ Ratings to Measure Speech Changes in Hypokinetic Dysarthria: A Proof-of-Concept Study" (Nightingale, Swartz, Ramig, & McAllister) was accepted to appear in the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. This paper builds on previous work conducted in collaboration with PRIISM methodologists on the subject of crowdsourcing perceptual ratings of clinical speech samples (McAllister Byun, Halpin & Szeredi 2015; McAllister Byun, Harel, Halpin, & Szeredi, 2016;  Harel, Hitchcock, Szeredi, Ortiz, & McAllister Byun, 2016; Fernandez, Harel, Ipeirotis, & McAllister, 2019). With many speech scientists looking to take their research online during COVID-19, this is a timely topic; we plan to share the paper along with resources to help other researchers set up their own studies using online crowdsourcing.