Cecilia Nakeva Von Mentzer

About Cecilia Nakeva Von Mentzer

Cecilia Nakeva von Mentzer has been a senior lecturer in hearing science at Örebro University since April 2019. She has a degree in Speech Language Pathology from Karolinska Institutet (1991) and a doctorate degree in disability research at Linköping University (2014). Cecilia Nakeva von Mentzer was previously a university lecturer in the Speech Language Pathology programme at Uppsala University.

Research

Cecilia Nakeva von Mentzer's research is mainly about assessment and treatment of speech difficulties, language impairment and reading difficulties in children with and without hearing impairments. This involves the development of assessment methods for language and speech perception, as well as the development and evaluation of methods for promoting children's speaking ability, language ability and reading ability. The research often takes place in collaboration with other professions such as psychologists, audiologists, engineers and special educators.

Cecilia Nakeva von Mentzer is part of the research environment Special Education, Development and Learning.

She is responsible for the research project Communicative activity and participation for children with developmental phonological disorders. The purpose of the research project is to shed light on the child's, guardian's and educator's experiences of whether and how speech and language disorders affect social interaction and feelings of participation. The goal is to define attitudes that create the best possible conditions for the child in two important environments, the home and the (pre)school.

Cecilia Nakeva von Mentzer has been part of the reference group for the subproject New teaching and learning environments, part of the strategic initiative Teacher Education for Tomorrow. 

During the years 2016–2019, Cecilia Nakeva von Mentzer conducted a postdoc study Listening difficulties in children in collaboration with Children’s Hospital in Cincinnati, USA. The aim was to develop a digital speech perception test and examine the hearing of preschool children with and without developmental phonological disorders. Results showed that, among children with typical development, 24.3 per cent had an extended high- frequency hearing loss. In children with developmental phonological disorders subclinical hearing loss was proposed as a potential factor.

During the same time, she conducted a questionnaire and medical record study on Swedish children with developmental phonological disorders with the aim of investigating how common it is for these children to have difficulty listening and how speech language pathologists examine listening ability. These results are currently compiled in collaboration with a researcher in speech language pathology Nelli Kalnak at Karolinska institutet.

At the same time, she developed a web-based test for sentence repetition that was used in a hearing aid study programmed with OpenSound Navigator for school-age children in Cincinnati. Preliminary results for this study show that sentence repetition performance is associated with length and age at first hearing aid fitting.

During the years 2015–2019, Cecilia Nakeva von Mentzer was responsible for the project Computer-based phonics intervention for children with Down syndrome (pdf). The study was launched to investigate whether children with DS in school units for children with mild intellectual disability or moderate to severe intellectual disability could benefit from computer-based phonics intervention for their reading development. 

During the years 2017–2020, Cecilia Nakeva von Mentzer participated in the study An evaluation of systematized phonics on reading proficiency in Swedish second grade poor readers: Effects on pseudoword and sight word reading skills. The results showed that systematized phonics was more effective than classroom teaching regarding children's reading ability of pseudowords and words. This study was among the top 10 most downloaded papers in the Journal of Dyslexia.

Teaching

Cecilia Nakeva von Mentzer teaches mainly in communication, voice, speech, pediatric audiology and professional approach in the Audiologist programme. She supervises essays at the undergraduate and master's level, and currently supervises at the doctoral level, Petter Kallioinen and a postdoc researcher in speech language pathology, Parivash Ranjbar.