Mary Boyle is an associate professor in Communication Sciences & Disorders at Montclair State University, a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and Board Certified by the Academy of Neurologic Communication Disorders and Sciences. She earned her bachelor's degree in Communication Sciences & Disorders from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Her clinical and research interests focus on the treatment of adults with neurogenic communication disorders, particularly aphasia. She has worked with this population for 30 years in medical, home-health care, and university settings. The focus of her current research is on word retrieval difficulties caused by aphasia. She is testing and refining a treatment to improve word retrieval impairments during discourse activities, and exploring the social validity of measures of word retrieval in the discourse of adults with and without neurological impairment.

Areas of specialization are aphasia, word-finding problems in aphasia, and neurogenic communication disorders.

Word Retrieval in Discourse

This project is seeking adults with and without aphasia. It involves recording and analyzing conversational speech and stories to see what kinds of word-finding problems occur and how often they occur. This information will be used to provide normative information about word-finding problems in everyday speech. It will also be used to determine how these problems vary from day-to-day. This will help us to determine whether changes in word-finding behavior after treatment can be attributed to the effects of the treatment or whether the changes are more likely to reflect normal day-to-day variability. For more information about this project, please call Mary Boyle at 973-655-7356 or email boylem@mail.montclair.edu