Suma Ramesh Devanga, Ph.D., CCC-SLP

Suma Ramesh Devanga, Ph.D., CCC-SLP

Assistant Professor and Speech Language Pathologist

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We aim to bridge the clinical-functional gap in managing acquired neurogenic communication disorders by studying intervention approaches that better help individuals with aphasia and other neurogenic communication disorders to communicate in everyday life. Our research typically involves discourse analyses of conversation samples from target participants and their communication partners in different settings.

Posts

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collaborations

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portfolio

projects

Studying the design, implementation and outcomes of group-based clinical interventions for acquired neurogenic communication disorders

Drawing on the power of social connections, group treatments have emerged to facilitate better generalization of language to everyday communication and improve life participation, while being cost-effective. We are designing novel group-based clinical interventions for acquired neurogenic communication disorders and investigating the power of university-based clinical programs that offer group treatments.

Clinical research on Collaborative Referencing Intervention (CRI)

Word finding or naming deficits are a hallmark of aphasia that persists in the chronic phase of recovery. We are drawing on distributed theories of communication that conceptualize communication as a creative and emergent accomplishment and theorize referencing (naming and pointing to things, ideas, people, and so on) as a collaborative process speakers and listeners must engage in together within specific interactions (e.g., Clark, 1992; Hanks, 1990). We have designed the collaborative referencing game as a clinical intervention situated within a rich communicative environment. Using the distributed perspective, we are studying the effects of the collaborative referencing intervention on participants’ communication, participation and confidence.

publications

Thin vs. thick description: Analyzing representations of people and their life worlds in the literature of Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD)

Published in American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2015

Evidence-based practice relies on clinicians to translate research evidence for individual clients. This study, the initial phase of a broader research project, examines the textual resources of such translations by analyzing how people with acquired cognitive-communication disorders (ACCD) and their life worlds have been represented in CSD research articles. Using textual analysis, we completed a categorical analysis of 6059 articles published between 1936 and 2012, coding for genre, population, and any evidence of thick representations of people and their life worlds, and a discourse analysis of representations used in 56 ACCD research articles, identifying thin and thick representations in four ICF-derived domains across article sections. The categorical analysis identified a higher percentage of ACCD articles with some evidence of thick representation (30%) compared to all CSD articles (12%) sampled. However, discourse analysis of ACCD research articles found that thick representations were quite limited; 34/56 articles had thin representational profiles, 19/56 had mixed profiles, and 3/56 had thick profiles. These findings document the dominance of thin representations in the CSD literature, which we suggest makes translational work more difficult. How clinicians translate such evidence will be addressed in the next research phase, an interview study of SLPs.

Recommended citation: Hengst, Julie & Devanga, Suma & Mosier, Hillary. (2015). Thin vs. thick description: Analyzing representations of people and their life worlds in the literature of Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD). American journal of speech-language pathology / American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. 24. https://doi.org/10.1044/2015_ajslp-14-0163

Profiling communicative activity: A CHAT approach to design of pseudo-intelligent mediators for Alternative and Augmentative Communication

Published in Outlines: Critical Practice Studies, 2016

The development of AAC technologies is of critical importance to the many people who are unable to speak intelligibly (or at all) due to a communication disorder, and to their many everyday interlocutors. Advances in digital technologies have revolutionized AAC, leading to devices that can "speak for" such individuals as aptly as it is illustrated in the case of the world famous physicist, Stephen Hawking. However, given their dependence on prefabricated language (and constant management by teams of people), current AAC devices are very limited in their ability to mediate everyday interactions. We argue here that the limits of AAC are firstly theoretical — grounded in prosthetic models that imagine AAC devices as replacements for damaged body parts and in transmission models of language production as communication. In contrast, our multidisciplinary team aims to design pseudo-intelligent mediators (PIMs) of communication by blending strengths of human mediators with features of current AAC technologies. To inform the design process, we report here our initial situated studies focusing on the distributed nature of everyday communicative activities conducted with potential AAC/PIM users. Our analysis focuses on the discursive alignments of these participants and their interlocutors, attending especially to the various ways their personal aides function as human mediators. Specifically, we focus on mapping the communicative activity around each of these differently-abled individuals (the majority of whom have cerebral palsy) as they navigated a university campus. We profile the everyday interactional patterns within functional systems and across settings, and present close discourse analysis of one interaction to highlight the diverse roles personal aides adopted in mediating communication. Finally, we argue that attending to differently "abled" bodies as they move through everyday communicative environments pushes CHAT to more fully theorize physicality, individual mobilities, and the roles of bodies in the laminated assemblage of functional systems.

Recommended citation: Hengst, Julie & McCartin, Maeve & Valentino, Hillary & Devanga, Suma & Sherrill, Martha. (2016). Profiling communicative activity: A CHAT approach to design of pseudo-intelligent mediators for Alternative and Augmentative Communication. Outlines: Critical Practice Studies. 17. 5-38. https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/24204

The Efficacy of Collaborative Referencing Intervention in Chronic Aphasia: A Mixed-Methods Study

Published in American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2021

The feasibility of a collaborative referencing intervention (CRI) for adults with chronic aphasia has been documented in two descriptive case studies (Devanga, 2014; Hengst et al., 2010, 2008). The current Phase II mixed-methods treatment study replicates the CRI with four additional participants (using interpretive research) and investigates how it impacts a traditional measure, participants" confrontational naming abilities, outside of game play (using multiple-probe single-case experimental design).

Recommended citation: Devanga, S. R., Sherrill, M., & Hengst, J. A. (2021). The efficacy of collaborative referencing intervention in chronic aphasia: A mixed methods study. American Journal of Speech Language Pathology, 30 (1S), 407-424. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_AJSLP-19-00108

Collaborative referencing using hand gestures in Wernicke’s aphasia: Discourse analysis of a case study

Published in Aphasiology, 2021

Background: Collaborative referencing tasks have evolved from historically being used as experiments to study human interactions in various disciplines, to being adapted as a clinical intervention for individuals with cognitive-communication disorders such as aphasia. For both neurotypical adults and adults with cognitive-communication disorders, evidence on successful referencing is heavily based on spoken language data. The patterns of collaborative referencing in individuals with severe spoken language impairments who extensively use hand gestures for communication remain unclear. Aims: We aimed to investigate the patterns of collaborative referencing between Clyde, an individual with severe Wernicke’s aphasia using co-speech hand gestures, and a clinician-partner during the collaborative referencing intervention (CRI). Methods & Procedures: This case study included 15 CRI sessions between Clyde and the clinician-partner. Each session consisted of a photo-matching game in which the pair completed six trials with alternating turns to describe and match treatment cards over a low barrier. Data analysis included (a) measuring the mean card placement accuracy; (b) measuring the mean length of CRI trials; and (c) analysing the frequency and type of hand gestures used in no common ground and common ground conditions, and then examining if the multimodal references (i.e., labels for treatment cards produced using verbal expressions and hand gestures) simplified across CRI sessions. Outcomes & Results: Largely, the results were consistent with previous evidence on CRI: the pair scored 99.63% mean card placement accuracy and completed each trial in shorter time periods, indicating reduced collaborative effort. During the no common ground condition, the pair used a high frequency of hand gestures and a variety of gesture-type combinations to reference each card, while they used a low frequency of hand gestures dominated by iconic gestures in the common ground condition. The multimodal references were found to be simplified across sessions by the shift from using indefinite to definite verbal references, and reduced frequency and specific (iconic) types of hand gestures. Conclusions: Despite severe spoken language impairments, speakers and partners can develop common ground for successful collaborative referencing by effectively using hand gestures. Clinical implications including the role of clinicians in being a skilful and multimodal communication partner and the rich communicative environment offered by CRI will be discussed.

Recommended citation: Devanga, S. R., Wilgenhof, R., & Mathew, M. Collaborative referencing using hand gestures in Wernicke’s aphasia: Discourse analysis of a case study. Aphasiology (E-publication ahead of print, June 2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2021.1937919

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