Anna Soares, a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, presented two research projects at the 2025 Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders (SRCLD) held in Madison, Wisconsin.
Soares, who is mentored by M. Adelaida Restrepo, PhD, professor and chair of the department, received a Student Travel Award for Research from SRCLD to support her participation. Her first presentation, titled “Key Linguistic Predictors of Developmental Language Disorder Risk in Bilingual Assessment,” examined the performance of specific subtests and items from the Spanish Screener for Language Impairment in Children in identifying bilingual children at risk for developmental language disorder (DLD).
The second presentation, titled “Integrating Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) into Language Screening for Bilingual Spanish-English Speakers,” focused on using ASR and NLP tools to improve the efficiency and accuracy of bilingual language assessments, with the goal of enhancing early identification of DLD in bilingual children.
Soares was the first author of the first poster, a collaborative project between Restrepo’s Bilingual Language and Literacy Lab at USF and Shelley Gray, PhD, of Arizona State University. She was the second author of the second poster, developed through collaboration between Restrepo’s lab and the lab of José Ortiz, PhD, at the University of Maryland. These presentations reflect Soares’s ongoing research under the mentorship of Restrepo and in collaboration with Gray and Ortiz.