BITS Lab at NYU

BITS Lab at NYU Using technology to understand and modify speech
PI: Tara McAllister
Follow on Instagram! https://www.instagram.com/bitslabstart/

How do children learn to talk? If children or adults want to change the way they speak, how can we help them make a rapid and lasting change? We measure how speakers learn under different practice conditions. Our focus is on how speech changes when the learner receives enhanced feedback from a computer.

Know a child/teen with typical speech aged 9-15 who is bored at home this summer OR wants to make a little extra cash OR...
07/15/2025

Know a child/teen with typical speech aged 9-15 who is bored at home this summer OR wants to make a little extra cash OR wants to help science?

We have a FULLY ONLINE study they can participate in and be compensated $25/hr (Amazon gift card). Participants will complete speech-related sensory tasks in a 1-hr Zoom call. Around 12 weeks later, we will schedule a follow-up Zoom call to administer the same tasks. (We want to know how much sensory skills change over this period of time.)

Know someone who might be interested? The study website is at https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/speechsensorystudy/home, including a link to a screening questionnaire.

This is Marcela Lara's master's thesis project - please help her advance our understanding of children's sensory development for speech!

We did it!! 🎉 Thanks to our amazing community, the staRt campaign officially hit our $10K goal — and smashed past it! I’...
07/09/2025

We did it!! 🎉 Thanks to our amazing community, the staRt campaign officially hit our $10K goal — and smashed past it! I’m so grateful to everyone who cheered us on and helped spread the word.

At the same time, we also celebrated our 20,000th download of the staRt app. Hitting both milestones together feels like an incredible moment for the whole staRt community.

With this support, our developers are beginning work this week on new features, including staRt for sibilants 🐍, and I’ll be preparing for our exclusive August webinar (https://sonoritylabs.com/webinar)

I'd like to share a special shout-out to our visionary sponsors:

⭐ Amy Graham of Graham Speech Therapy
⭐ Keila Gutierrez of Desert Lily Bilingual Speech Therapy Clinic
⭐ Lindsey Hockel of Rock the R

I’m so excited for what’s ahead — and grateful to everyone joining us on this journey.

150+ SLPs have already signed up for this summer's exclusive staRt webinar! https://sonoritylabs.com/startappcrowdfundWh...
06/27/2025

150+ SLPs have already signed up for this summer's exclusive staRt webinar! https://sonoritylabs.com/startappcrowdfund

Whether you're new to biofeedback or looking to up your game, this one-hour live session has everything you need to treat tough R cases with confidence.

Your $25 contribution reserves your spot and helps us keep this evidence-based tool growing. We’re aiming for 60 more supporters to unlock our next big feature — staRt for sibilants! 🐍

The campaign ends Wednesday 7/3/25 — don’t miss your chance to join us! ⏰

Since 2014, I’ve had the privilege of leading the team behind staRt, an app that puts visual-acoustic biofeedback in the...
06/05/2025

Since 2014, I’ve had the privilege of leading the team behind staRt, an app that puts visual-acoustic biofeedback in the hands of speech-language pathologists and families across the country.

We’re about to hit a major milestone: 20,000 downloads. That’s 20,000 kids, families, and clinicians working on the tricky English "r" sound using tools grounded in scientific evidence.

We’re thrilled...and also a little overwhelmed!

staRt has always been supported by research grants. But hosting, maintaining, and improving the app gets more expensive each year—and grant funding is getting harder to secure. (Earlier this semester, half our lab’s funding was terminated by executive order.)

To keep staRt growing and accessible, we’ve launched a crowdfunding campaign. If staRt has made a difference for you - or if you believe in making speech tools more accessible - we would be honored to have your support. Please share! https://sonoritylabs.com/startappcrowdfund

Know a child/teen who loves STEM in NYC or northern NJ? We are looking for participants aged 9-17 with typical speech an...
10/01/2024

Know a child/teen who loves STEM in NYC or northern NJ? We are looking for participants aged 9-17 with typical speech and language development for a project investigating sensory and speech skills. It includes a chance to see their tongue during speech using ultrasound imaging! The study offers compensation of $20/hour and can be a great introduction to the scientific research process. We have study sites at NYU and Montclair State University. For more info and our sign-up form, see https://bit.ly/nyuspeechstudy; feel free to reach out to us at nyuchildspeech@gmail.com with any questions.

Thinking of pursuing a PhD in communicative sciences and disorders? Join me on 10/9/24 (6PM-8PM Eastern) for a virtual i...
09/10/2024

Thinking of pursuing a PhD in communicative sciences and disorders? Join me on 10/9/24 (6PM-8PM Eastern) for a virtual info session on our fully funded 5-year program! Attendees will learn about our mission and curriculum and hear tips for a successful application. Breakout sessions will offer a chance to meet our research faculty and current doctoral students. Please register here to obtain the Zoom link: https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/events/communicative-sciences-and-disorders-phd-online-info-session

Exciting news: our team was awarded a $20K planning grant through NYU's Discovery Research Fund for Human Health. Our pr...
08/28/2024

Exciting news: our team was awarded a $20K planning grant through NYU's Discovery Research Fund for Human Health. Our project "Enhancing Speech Therapy Through Multimodal Artificial Intelligence" aims to develop AI tools that will support more effective intervention for residual speech sound disorder. This project is part of Amanda Eads' dissertation work and includes multidisciplinary contributions from Hai Shu (NYU Global Public Health) and Brian McFee (NYU Music Technology/Data Science). Amanda will be augmenting the PERCEPT corpus of children's /r/ sounds (developed through Nina Benway’s doctoral work at Syracuse University) with ultrasound images to try to infer tongue shapes for correct and incorrect /r/ from the acoustic signal. The goal is to allow clinicians to "see inside the mouth" as if they had ultrasound imaging. In the longer term, we hope these tools can support more effective home practice so kids can improve their speech (and move off the caseload) faster!

ASHA notifications are out and we're excited to share the latest from our lab and collaborators in Seattle this December...
07/19/2024

ASHA notifications are out and we're excited to share the latest from our lab and collaborators in Seattle this December! Here's what we'll be presenting:

Acoustic Comparison of Rhotic Acquisition in Biofeedback Versus Motor-Based Treatment for Residual Speech Sound Disorder - This is a student poster led by SPARC award recipient Marcela Lara 🏆

Biofeedback Demystified: /ɹ/ Basics for Busy Clinicians - A one-hour seminar that I will be co-presenting with Elaine Hitchcock (Montclair State University) on our work with Jon Preston and colleagues at Syracuse Unviersity!

Improving the Accessibility of Gender-Affirming Voice Training with Visual-Acoustic Biofeedback - This poster will share early findings from BITS Lab's collaboration with Vesna Novak and Tory McKenna from University of Cincinnati; we'd love to hear your feedback 👂

Visual-Acoustic Biofeedback Intervention for /s/ Misarticulation via Telepractice: A Pilot Study - A poster highlighting an exciting new direction led by Michelle Swartz and Elaine Hitchcock's team at Montclair!

New pub alert! Our paper "Word and Gender Identification in the Speech of Transgender Individuals" (Kristina Doyle, Daph...
07/19/2024

New pub alert! Our paper "Word and Gender Identification in the Speech of Transgender Individuals" (Kristina Doyle, Daphna Harel, Graham Feeny, Vesna Novak, & McAllister) was just released in the Journal of Voice. This paper was spearheaded by Kristina, who was the first student to pursue a master's thesis in the context of the time-intensive NYU Steinhardt Speech@NYU online program.

We reanalyzed data from a previous experiment in which trans women matched shifted targets for resonance using visual-acoustic biofeedback. We wanted to know whether listeners would have more difficulty identifying the word produced when speakers were matching a shifted target. We did find evidence that word identification and speaker gender identification are interrelated processes, but we did not observe a significant negative impact of formant shifts on word identification accuracy. This is a positive finding for practitioners who target resonance in the context of gender-affirming voice training (GAVT).

Congratulations to Kristina and watch this space for next steps from our research on biofeedback for resonance in the GAVT context!

BITS Lab students are 🔥 these days! Please join me in a round of applause for NYU CSD students at three levels who just ...
05/15/2024

BITS Lab students are 🔥 these days! Please join me in a round of applause for NYU CSD students at three levels who just reached thesis-related milestones. Doctoral candidate Amanda Eads successfully proposed her dissertation, which will explore the use of ultrasound tongue shape data to enhance classifiers for children's /ɹ/ sounds 👏 👏 Master's student Barbara Scheer was accepted into the honors program with her proposal to analyze children's responses to altered auditory feedback in a "fast adapt" paradigm 👏 👏 And graduating senior Marcela Lara received approval of her honors thesis comparing acoustic measures of children's gains in /ɹ/ production over the course of treatment with and without biofeedback. 👏 👏 👏 Congratulations to all for these great contributions!

Congratulations to all the new doctors who received their hoods at the NYU Steinhardt PhD hooding ceremony…especially BI...
05/14/2024

Congratulations to all the new doctors who received their hoods at the NYU Steinhardt PhD hooding ceremony…especially BITS Lab’s own Xi Chen! I learned so much working with Xi, who has a passion for prosody (not an easy thing to study!) in both clinical and second-language learning contexts. Her work on understanding and treating speech symptoms in adults with Parkinson’s who speak a tone language is an important contribution in an understudied area, and we are excited to see where her career leads. Cheers, Dr. Chen!

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