Amira El-Dinary and Amanda Gryskevicz like to call themselves the “A-Team.” While they borrow their name from a television show from nearly 40 years ago, they are forward-thinking with their research and studies in linguistics and psychology.
The pair of rising fourth-year Scholars spent eight weeks together this past summer at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. While there, El-Dinary and Gryskevicz began working on a proect for which they would collect and analyze speech recognition data from English monolingual and Dutch-English bilingual speakers to gain a deeper understanding of speech perception. Ultimately, their findings could help improve word learning and conversation.
El-Dinary summarized the project saying that “participants will be listening to single words in background speech. For example, we will play the word ‘lawnmower’ in the presence of two speakers talking in the background and the goal is to identify and type the word ‘lawnmower’ and tune out the background sentences.”
The seeds for their research and international studies were planted in the fall of 2020, when life at Penn State functioned a bit differently than it does today.
“I was a teaching assistant for a Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) class, which is my major, and at the time, Amanda was also in that major and a student in the class,” said El-Dinary. “Everything was on Zoom, and she popped into my Zoom office hours.”
“I was a teaching assistant for a Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) class, which is my major, and at the time, Amanda was also in that major and a student in the class,” said El-Dinary. “Everything was on Zoom, and she popped into my Zoom office hours.”
“She was so open to me, and we were able to bounce ideas off each other. I thought, ‘This is going to be a great academic colleague,’ and it turned out to be so much more than that,” Gryskevicz continued.
In the summer of 2021, Gryskevicz’s enthusiasm for psychology prompted her to change her major. However, her interests in the science around communication and its associated disorders helped maintain the burgeoning connection between her and El-Dinary.
That same summer, the pair connected in person for the first time. The women got along just as well face-to-face as they did online and soon after began pursuing their opportunity to travel internationally and study linguistics.
With help from advisors who understood the synergy between their disciplines, El-Dinary and Gryskevicz applied for and were accepted into Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE). Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, PIRE has established an “international research network that has enabled new discoveries about the consequences of bilingual and multilingual experience for learning and the brain.”
In reflecting on what made PIRE the ideal international study program for them, the women highlighted how it incorporated three critical factors; traveling to a different country, doing research, and writing their theses. For Gryskevicz in particular, the travel element was especially exciting.
“I never previously had the time or resources to travel outside the country,” she said. “A lot of our education abroad training modules mentioned some of the culture shock you can get. I remember thinking while we were preparing for the program, ‘I want to be culturally shocked.’”
Beyond experiencing a new country, El-Dinary and Gryskevicz spent many hours immersed in their research. They attended a linguistics conference at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, then a few weeks later, presented to colleagues at the Institute on their project’s progress. The presentation was especially valuable because they shared their work with researchers and scholars who “make it their lives work to investigate what we had only spent a few months on.”
Navin Viswanathan, associate professor in CSD, is an advisor on the project and sees the potential for impactful real-world applications for El-Dinary’s and Gryskevicz’s findings.
“Work including the type that Amanda and Amira are engaged in is critical to understanding both foundational aspects of speech-in-noise processing as well as developing solutions to the problems such as listening in noisy conditions,” he said.
