Research Focus:

Mili Kuruvilla-Dugdale directs the Speech Perception and Kinematics (SPeaK) Lab. Her research focuses on articulatory motor performance in neurodegenerative diseases, with the goal of developing more sensitive speech assessments. She and her collaborators are also working on innovative systems to accurately track tongue dysfunction and build personalized electronic voices for individuals with progressive speech loss. Her research is funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. 

Courses Taught:

• CSD 3187: Experiential Learning: Community Engagement Through Communication and Literacy Programs
• CSD 4115: Structural Disorders
• CSD 5238: Motor Speech Disorders

Selected Publications/Active Grants:

• NIDCD R21 Generating Personalized Synthetic Speech for Progressive Dysarthria Using Severity-Appropriate Adaptation Strategies for Neural Text-to-Speech and Voice Conversion
• Stipancic, K., Golzy, M., Zhao, Y., Pinkerton, L., Rohl, A., & Kuruvilla-Dugdale, M. (in press). Improving perceptual speech ratings: The effects of auditory training on judgments of dysarthric speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.
• Kuruvilla-Dugdale, M., & Mefferd, A. (2022). Articulatory performance in dysarthria: Using a data-driven approach to estimate articulatory demands and deficits. Brain Sciences, 12(10), 1409-1428.
• Kim, D., Kuruvilla-Dugdale, M., Riesthal, M., Robin, J., Bagnato, F., & Mefferd, A. (2021). Articulatory correlates of stress pattern disturbances in talkers with dysarthria. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 64(6S), 2287-2300.
• Zhao, Y., Song, M., Yue, Y., & Kuruvilla-Dugdale, M. (2021, July). Personalizing TTS Voices for Progressive Dysarthria. In 2021 IEEE EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (pp. 1-4).