Emerging Scholars Award
The College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign is dedicated to enhancing representation and providing support to underrepresented scholars, and research focused on issues related to diversity. The goal of this award is to support emerging scholars and cultivate diversity in future health sciences researchers and faculty.
The College of Applied Health Sciences’ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee is excited to share the winners our Inaugural Emerging Scholars Program. Dr. Kristina Bowdrie, AuD and Tori Justin will be presenting talks on Friday, April 26, 2024 from noon to 1:30 p.m. in room 112 Huff Hall.
Join us in person or via Zoom.
Dr. Kristina Bowdrie, AuD
It’s All in The Family! The effects of the family home environment on temperament and receptive language in deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children
Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children continue to experience wide variability in spoken language outcomes, even with hearing aids and cochlear implants. Our laboratory has explored how the family environment and interactions between members within the family system can influence these outcomes. We will present results from two projects that examined the interactive effects of child temperament—biological traits resulting in individual differences in regulatory abilities and emotional reactivity – and family-related factors (e.g., caregiver language and overstimulation in the home) on receptive language in DHH children. For the first project, we examined how overstimulation (i.e., auditory, visual, and cognitive “noise”) in the home influence the relation between child temperament and receptive language in 59 families of typically hearing (TH) children and 58 families of DHH children between the ages of 3-7 years. In DHH children, we found that high regulatory skills were positively related to receptive language skills when the level of overstimulation within the home was low to moderate. These effects were not observed in children with TH. For the second project, we examined how caregiver linguistic input (quantified using syntactic complexity and lexical diversity) influenced the relation between child temperament and receptive language in 59 DHH children aged 3-7 years. Results revealed that when caregivers used lower to moderate levels of lexical diversity, DHH children’s regulatory abilities were positively related to their receptive language skills. When caregivers used higher levels of lexical diversity, their regulatory abilities and receptive language skills were not related to each other. These findings suggest that the positive effects of supportive home environments (i.e., characterized by rich language from caregivers and less auditory, visual, and cognitive “noise”) allows DHH children to achieve optimal language outcomes based on their inherent dispositions. These aspects of the home environment may serve as potential targets of intervention for this clinical population.
How Race(ism) Has Been, and Persists to be, Employed in Physiological Examinations: A History of the Present
Kinesiological science, which has roots in the biological and medical professions, has a long and controversial history of involvement in efforts to measure and explain “racial differences” in human movement and physiological capacity in the United States. Using scholarly literature, this presentation will describe how historical understandings of “race” and “racial differences” influenced the scholarship of early kinesiology leaders, and how their understandings persist to inform contemporary examinations of cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and cardiovascular health (CVH) via scoping review. The goal of this presentation is to acknowledge the impact that historical notions of race have on contemporary CRF and CVH, summarize patterns in CRF and CVH research in relation to “race” and “racial differences", and provide recommendations that can inform future research practices.