Q&A with Yazmin Ahmad Rusli, as part of receiving the 2015 Ohio Student Enhancement Award
Learning how to speak and to understand what other people are saying is an essential part of childhood. But for some children, acquiring these skills is not easy. Ohio University graduate student Yazmin Ahmad Rusli received a 2015 Student Enhancement Award to investigate the aspects of working memory that help children process and understand spoken language. She hopes to contribute to the understanding of memory-based models in sentence comprehension.
Ahmad Rusli grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and studied speech sciences at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), where she is a junior faculty member. At Ohio University, she’s pursing her doctorate as a member of the Developmental Psycholinguistics Lab in Communication Sciences and Disorders, School of Rehabilitation and Communication Sciences.
Photo credit: Jean Andrews/Ohio University
1. Why did you choose this field of study for graduate school?
Actually, I chose speech language pathology on a whim. At the time there were no local speech pathologists in Malaysia and it sounded like an interesting topic. It turned out to be the best choice I made—without having an informed opinion! Sometimes good things have a way of unfolding on their own!
I was interested in the area of social cognition and worked with infants in Durham (UK) when I was studying for my master’s degree in understanding disordered development. I was looking to pursue doctoral studies, when Dr. Brooke Hallowell, who is a regular visiting professor at UKM, introduced me to the work of Dr. James Montgomery. He studies the cognitive mechanisms (such as memory, attention) that underlie language processing, and the relationship between these measures in children who are typically developing and children with specific language impairment (SLI).
2. How would you describe your research?
It takes a lot of mental effort to understand language as it is being spoken to us. Complex sentences such as “The woman the man greeted walked into the garden” are especially difficult for children to understand since it is not clear who the doer is in the sentence. Children have to work out in their mind who did what and to whom, with the help of their working memory ability. The focus of my project is to investigate how specific elements within working memory relates to and support children’s understanding of these complex sentences.
3. How are you doing your study?
We’ve recruited children for this study since the beginning of summer, and I’m hoping to have completed recruitment by early 2016. Children come in for several testing sessions where they are asked to work on the computer to do some memory games and listening games.
4. What research questions are you trying to answer?
I am trying to find out which elements of working memory would be better predictors of children’s comprehension skills. I’m also trying to determine whether the kinds of working memory tasks used (for example, verbal versus nonverbal tasks) would need to match the modality (the way in which something is done) of the predicted skill, in order to provide a better explanation of the relationship between working memory and comprehension.
5. What is the grant allowing you to do?
The grant has allowed me to set up the means to compensate participants and their parents, as well as purchasing office materials to prepare for testing. Just as important, the grant covers the costs of attending conferences to share my results with my peers and the general public.
6. Why is this project important to you personally?
This study is a pre-dissertation project for me, where I have the opportunity to collect pilot data for my dissertation proposal. It’s crucial because we need pilot data to make initial assertions, and because it allows me to think ahead of time and involve myself in the research experience before actually doing my dissertation. It gives me a “heads up” on what to expect in an expanded study.
7. How will this project help to advance your field?
Better understandings of the mental processes that take place in comprehension have important theoretical and clinical implications: First, to understand how children learn and develop these abilities, and second, the longer-range impact would be for us to use this information to help children with SLI, who have major difficulties in verbal working memory and sentence comprehension.
8. Describe something totally fun about your project.
Working on developing and programming my experiments and finally getting to see it in “action”—super cool. I also really enjoy spending time with the children—it’s a highlight! I hadn’t been working with school-age children before this, so interacting with them and learning about the things that go on within that age range has been really fun.
9. What’s something you want others to know about your subject?
In essence, we are trying to understand what goes on in the brain and the connections that enable children to learn and understand language. For most of us, we’re able to understand language so effortlessly that we take the process for granted. There’s a lot of different things that have to work precisely for comprehension to be successful. For some kids, they go on a different developmental route in developing these skills, and find it a struggle to learn and understand language. Ultimately, we are pursuing ways to develop effective therapies to help these children.
10. What’s something you enjoy about Ohio University not related to your graduate studies?
The people around me! My friends and colleagues in Athens are very supportive; not just regarding my work, but also in my family life. I’m here with my 3-year-old daughter while my husband is back home working in Malaysia. It’s a challenging situation, but over the years we have really come to liking the pace and living here in beautiful Athens.
Source: Q & A with Yazmin Ahmad Rusli: Understanding how children comprehend spoken language