Lauren S. Aaronson Pilot Awardee: Panying Rong, Ph.D., University of Kansas
By Frontiers , Clinical and Translational Science Institute
Oct 30, 2025
Project Title: An explanatory model of speech intelligibility declines in persons with progressive neurological diseases.
Panying Rong, Ph.D., is currently an associate professor in the University of Kansas’ Department of Speech Language Hearing: Sciences & Disorders. She also holds an appointment in the Bioengineering Program in the KU School of Engineering. This may seem like an unusual combination, but Rong’s research spans disciplines. Rong focuses on speech acoustics and production, exploring how speakers produce acoustic waveforms and how speech acoustics differ by age and health.
In her Lauren S. Aaronson Pilot Award, Rong will be developing an objective measure to phenotype progressive communication disorders in people with neurodegenerative diseases based on both cognitive-linguistic function and motor-speech function. Communication disorders in neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS, Parkinson’s Disease (PD), and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), can include cognitive-linguistic impairments and/or motor-speech impairments. Cognitive-linguistics impairments include difficulties understanding and using language, while motor-speech impairments include difficulty with the physical production of speech.
In neurodegenerative disorders, Rong says, “depending on which part of the brain and nervous system are impaired, there could be differential impairment in these functions.”
Being able to clinically assess cognitive-linguistic and motor-speech impairments may allow clinicians to detect atypical neurodegeneration earlier and more accurately. This could be beneficial when it comes to correctly differentially diagnosing various neurodegenerative disorders and designing and implementing treatments.
To do this, Rong and her team will examine speech acoustics, surface facial electromyography, and text network analysis of participant recordings of speech. Based on a spontaneous speech task, Rong will measure the various acoustic properties of speech production, the neuromuscular activity of facial muscles during speech, and the participants’ word finding and syntactic abilities. By studying all these domains of speech and communication, Rong hopes that researchers and clinicians will be able to use this toolkit to identify when asymptomatic individuals may be at risk for developing, or have started to develop, neurodegeneration-associated communication and speech impairments. This toolkit will also be useful in shaping the timing of treatment initiation and when to advance support needs. In all, Rong’s project combines her passion for and understanding of highly heterogeneous neurodegenerative disorders of aging, a group of diseases with more questions than answers.
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