Education Student Selected to Present Research Findings at National Conference

Kimberly Graham, a student in Old Dominion University's master's degree program in speech-language pathology/communication sciences and disorders, recently received notification that she was one of 15 students nationally selected to receive a travel award to this year's national convention of the American Speech-Language and Hearing Association in New Orleans.

Graham is the first author on her graduate research project, "Effects of Word Retrieval Training for Semantic Anomia." Anomia is the inability to think of words for persons and objects that can occur as a result of neurological conditions such as stroke.

Student papers that are rated the highest among all submissions receive the travel award, said Anastasia Raymer, professor of speech-language pathology at ODU and a co-author of Graham's paper. Graham will present the results of her research at the conference on Nov. 19 as part of a poster session on topics related to neurologic communication disorders.

Her project was supported by Raymer's National Institutes of Health grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.