Rachel R. Romeo Profile picture
Sep 30, 2020 7 tweets 2 min read Read on X
THREAD. Ok, this must be said. To everyone who is down on Joe Biden for sounding, slow, old, confused last night -- let's put things in perspective. Biden has been managing his fluency disorder (also called stuttering) his whole life. #WeSpeechies #SLPeeps #StutteringAwareness
Stuttering is exacerbated by stress, and Trump knows this. He was trying to fluster Biden, to make him stutter so that he sounds "dumb." Despite the circumstances, Biden did a REMARKABLE job managing the stress and using the exact strategies we as SLPs often teach.
Many of these strategies, to the naive person, may make him sound slow or confused. For example: 1) Speak slowly, and especially ease into the first word -- to the naive person this can make you sound slow, but in fact it's strategic.
2) If you find yourself stuck on a word with particularly troublesome sounds, try to use a different word instead -- that may make you sound confused, or like you forgot what you were saying, but again, it's a tried and true strategy.
3) Give the word a "light touch" -- this may sound like you're cowering or mumbling, but it helps you avoid some potentially tricky sounds.
If you think Biden sounds old, weak, slow, confused -- believe me, he knows EXACTLY what he's doing, and he's doing it beautifully given the ridiculously difficult and bullying circumstances. I for one am incredibly proud to see speech disorder recovery on a national stage!
And while telling your bullying interlocutor to shut up is not a canonical strategy, I'm considering adding it to my bag of tricks 😁

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More from @RachelRRomeo

Sep 9, 2022
Apparently I'm the 1st faculty member in my dept in 10+ yrs to request Federal Work Study to pay UG researchers. Application took 30 mins, approved in 2 weeks. All prior UGs worked for course credit or volunteer. If you want equity in the pipeline, PAY THE UNDERGRADS WHO NEED IT!
Also, this is not a dig on my colleagues. It's a dig on the system that makes equitable access opaque and a nightmare.
Oh, and for those who may not know: FWS is a form of financial aid that students with need can be awarded, but they have to then find a paid job on/off campus to earn that $$. Because the govt pays it, it means it's no cost to faculty unless they work more than they are awarded
Read 9 tweets
Sep 16, 2021
@Heino1Olli @gabrieli_john Hi! Thanks for the interest in our work! However, I feel the need to correct an inaccurate and potentially harmful narrative in your phrasing, and how our study relates to it, if you’ll allow me. This will take a few tweets.
@Heino1Olli @gabrieli_john First is the phrase “30 million word gap.” This term has gotten a lot of mileage, and I confess to having used it earlier in my career without fully understanding its impact – that’s on me. But it’s not accurate or helpful, and I have work to do to correct it.
@Heino1Olli @gabrieli_john First, it’s not accurate. The research that popularized this term was based on an extrapolation of a small slice of life, and @davidjpurpura has shown that it’s scientifically implausible for a gap that large to arise in a few short years doi.org/10.1111/cdev.1…
Read 12 tweets
May 19, 2020
Thread: Allow me a *potentially controversial* soapbox for a moment. I just attended @DaniSBassett’s amazing virtual talk at #UConnBIRC about her excellent new paper on quantifying citation bias (btw this is an absolute must read: doi.org/10.1101/2020.0…). 1/
Her team elegantly shows how neuroscience papers w/ a female first and/or last author are systematically undercited, primarily driven by papers w/ male first & last authors. Not explained by subfield, impact, historical underrepresentation of women in science, etc. 2/
She made a concerted point that this is a group effect, and that **not all** men in science do this. She specifically highlighted one male scientist who showed the opposite trend of that expected. Kudos, sir! 3/
Read 12 tweets
Aug 28, 2019
I just had such an affirming experience. On my 8hr intl flight back from a conference, I sat next to a father/son. In broken English, the father began to apologize/warn me that his ~10 yr-old son had severe nonverbal autism, and that this would like be a difficult journey. 1/
I told him not to worry, I was a speech-language pathologist with lots of experience with minimally verbal kiddos. Challenging behaviors began even before take off: screaming, hitting me, and grabbing for my things. The father repeatedly apologized, but did little else. 2/
I asked him how his son preferred to communicate. He didn’t seem to understand. Perhaps this was a language barrier, but I think instead the child had very little experience with communication therapy. I put away the talk I was working on & asked if I could try. He nodded. 3/
Read 9 tweets
May 13, 2019
Pausing #academictwitter to brag on my wife Jess Romeo today for becoming a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner from @MGHInstitute to add to her degrees in psych &social work! While I study poverty from behind the scenes, she’s on the front lines directly treating the underserved. 1/ Image
The darker side of poverty that no one wants to acknowledge is that it is a direct contributor to massive disparities in mental health and access to care. Jess specializes in treating addiction, major mental illness, dual diagnoses, and corrections/offender rehabilitation. 2/
Nearly all of her patients are on Medicaid and many are LGBT, as we are at a drastically increased risk of mental illness and addiction. Most importantly, she treats the forgotten and stigmatized with compassion and humanity. 3/
Read 5 tweets
Nov 19, 2018
I'm reflecting on my notes from various sessions at ASHA, and encountering one of my enduring pet peeves over and over: When researchers consider cognitive scores as stable traits, exact measures, or worse, indicative solely of some sort of inherent, native ability. 1/5
Having personally assessed many hundreds of children, the child’s state on test day can bias an individual score dramatically, and from a clinical standpoint, rarely does a single test encompass someone’s true potential. 2/5
Plus, we know how malleable these scores are through natural experience or experimental procedures. So I got squirmy when I heard a presentation that referred to cognitive scores as “something we can’t change.” 3/5
Read 5 tweets

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