Dr. Allyson Page is an Assistant Professor within the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders.

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Professor Allyson Page has focused her academic career on the study of disordered speech production and communicative participation in adults with degenerative neurological diseases, especially from the perspective of comprehensive outcomes. The conceptual framework of the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) serves to inform the theoretical underpinning of her research. Her research focuses on dysarthria, a motor speech disorder. Dysarthria is a neurological speech movement disorder that can produce abnormalities in speech production. The majority of her research concentrates on two dysarthrias: 1) the dysarthria associated with Parkinson’s disease (PD) (hypokinetic dysarthria), and; 2) the dysarthria associated with oromandibular dystonia (OMD) (hyperkinetic dysarthria). Her program of research focuses on these clinical populations because hypokinetic dysarthria associated with PD is one of the most common types of adult-onset dysarthria, and the hyperkinetic dysarthria associated with OMD is under-investigated and represents a theoretically important group in our understanding of speech production.  

Professor Page’s research centers on studying dysarthric speech production from a multidimensional perspective. The ICF provides a framework for the description of an individual’s health and health-related components of well-being. Within the ICF, the three constructs titled ‘body functions and structures’, ‘activity’ and ‘participation’ describe functioning from the perspective of the body, the individual, and the individual in a social context, respectively. The ICF framework provides a theoretical perspective/framework from which to make explanations of how disabilities can arise from societal phenomena rather than from just being a disease or a disorder. Accordingly, the ICF conceptual framework facilitates an understanding for clinicians and researchers regarding the complex nature of dysarthric speech production. The framework provides unique opportunities to study dysarthria from a broader perspective. For example, her research contributes to the understanding of speech intelligibility from multiple perspectives that range from acoustic and perceptual phenomenon to the impact of reduced intelligibility on communicative participation. As a result, she has been able to study each aspect separately as well as relationships among these aspects. The rationale for adopting the conceptual framework of the ICF to study dysarthria is based on the concept that dysarthric speech is multifaceted and its study requires a broad and a holistic approach.