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Mary Boyle
Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders
- Office:
- 1515 Broad Street 2176
- Email:
- boylem@montclair.edu
- Phone:
- 973-655-7356
- Degrees:
- BS, University of Massachusetts- Amherst
- MA, Northwestern University
- PhD, Northwestern University
- vCard:
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Profile
Mary Boyle is a 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.
Specialization
Areas of specialization are aphasia, word-finding problems in aphasia, and neurogenic communication disorders.
Research Projects
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@montclair.edu
Outcomes of Conversation Group Treatment on Discourse in Aphasia
This project is focused on understanding how participation in group treatment (focused on improving the ability to convey a message during conversations centered on current events and participants' activities) affected participants' ability to produce structured and conversational discourse.
Linguistic Underpinnings of Narrative in Aphasia (LUNA)
This international project, based at City University of London and funded by the Stroke Association of the United Kingdom, is developing a novel treatment for aphasia using personal narratives.
Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS) for aphasia
This project involves an intertnational group of aphasia researchers who are collaborating to promote the use of consistent terminology when reporting treatment studies for aphasia, based on the system introduced to the rehabilitation community in Van Stan et al., The Rehabilitation Specification System: Implications for improvements in research design, reporting, replication, and synthesis. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 100, 164-155. Our first project is a series of papers applying the RTSS system to various rehabilitation approaches for aphasia.