Victoria Tumanova, assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders in the College of Arts and Sciences, recently received a $10,000 New Investigators Research Grant from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. The award supports new scientists who have earned their doctorate degree in communication sciences within the last decade and who are pursuing research in audiology or speech-language pathology.
Victoria Tumanova
Tumanova, who has been at Syracuse since 2013, focuses her research on the roles of temperament, linguistic and speech motor control abilities in the development of stuttering in young children. She received a Ph.D. in speech and hearing science in 2010 from the University of Iowa. She is also the author of several published studies looking at the behavior and speech development of young children who stutter.
In her project, titled “Effects of emotional processes on speech motor control and speech motor learning in preschool-age children who do and do not stutter,” she investigates why young children may stutter more when excited or sad and how the emotional reactivity may be associated with stuttering development during preschool years.
“Several studies have shown that children who stutter are more reactive and less able to regulate their reactivity and attention than nonstuttering children. We’re trying to uncover how these differences in emotional reactivity and regulation may affect speech production, specifically speech fluency in these children,” Tumanova says.
The A&S news staff caught up with Tumanova to gain more insight into her important work.
