Rate My Professor Stephanie Borrie

Stephanie Borrie is a Professor and Emma Eccles Jones Dean’s Scholar in Speech-Language Pathology at Utah State University, where she also serves as Interim Associate Dean for Research in the Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services. She directs the Human Interaction Lab in the Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences, focusing on speech communication as a dynamic process between partners. A native of New Zealand, Borrie earned her Ph.D. in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of Canterbury in 2011, with a dissertation titled Perceptual Learning of Dysarthric Speech, and a prior degree in Speech-Language Therapy from the same institution in 2005. She completed postdoctoral training in the Motor Speech Disorders Lab at Arizona State University before joining Utah State University in 2014 as an assistant professor in the Department of Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education.

Borrie’s research investigates speech perception, human interaction, and motor speech disorders, particularly dysarthria in individuals with neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, stroke, and ALS. Her work examines how listeners adapt to dysarthric speech and how conversation partners coordinate behaviors through entrainment for effective communication. As principal investigator, she has secured seven grants totaling more than $6 million from the National Institutes of Health, including multimillion-dollar awards in 2024 and 2025 for clinical trials on listener training strategies to enhance intelligibility in Parkinson’s disease. Key publications include Portnova et al. (2025) on fundamental frequency variation in Parkinson’s speakers in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research; Wynn et al. (2024) on context-dependent conversational speech behaviors; Borrie et al. (2023) on perceptual learning of dysarthria in adolescence; and Wynn et al. (2022) on classifying conversational entrainment in the Journal of Phonetics. In 2024, she received the inaugural Emma Eccles Jones Dean’s Scholar award, a three-year $45,000 honor recognizing her scholarship. Borrie presented at TEDxUSU in 2017 on vocal entrainment and USU’s Blue Plate Research Series in 2024 on conversation science. Her scholarship, with over 1,900 citations, bridges basic research and clinical applications to improve communication outcomes.